Email Confirmation

[Dville]

I would like to add email confirmation to my current basic member system.

Does anyone know of any articles, that can explain how to add this. Or maybe does anyone know of a simple concept of how this would actually work?

I am pretty clueless when it comes to what goes on behind the scenes during an email confirmation.

Thanks in advanced.

[hostfreak]

An email confirmation for what? New registrations, information change, or what?

[Dville]

new signups, yes. before allowing them to sign into their account

[tomfmason]

This is what I do. First when the user signs up I create a random string with a function like this.

[code=php:0]
function makestring() {
 $salt = "abchefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyz0123456789";
 srand((double)microtime()*1000000);  
     $i = 0;
     while ($i <= 22) {
           $num = rand() % 33;
           $tmp = substr($salt, $num, 1);
           $rstring = $rstring . $tmp;
           $i++;
     }
     return $rstring;
}[/code]

After I create the string I insert this random string into the database in a field called confirm and send them an email with a link like this. http://www.yoursite.com/comfirm.php?id=arandomstring&[email protected]

Here is the confirm.php
[code]<?php
include("db.php");
$id = mysql_real_escape_string(trim($_GET['id']));
$email = mysql_real_escape_string(trim($_GET['email']));

$sql = sprintf("SELECT COUNT(*) AS `confirm` FROM `users` WHERE `id` = '%s' AND `email` = '%s'", $id, $email);
$res = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_query());
$confirm  = mysql_result($res, 0, 'confirm');

if ($confirm == 1) {
   $q = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE `email` = '$email'") or die(mysql_error());
   while($rw = mysql_fetch_assoc($q)) {
    echo "Hello " . $rw['username'] . " you have confirmed your the email address $email";
}
}else{
   echo "There was some kind of error. Please contact the webmaster";
}
?>[/code]

Hope this helps,
Tom

[Dville]

Sweet, thanks again.

[Dville]

So would I update the 'confirm' row in confirm.php, to something like 'confirmed' and in login.php, have it check for confirmed in the  confirm row, and if it is anything other than 'confirmed' then not allow them to login?

[tomfmason]

Yes sorry forgot to metion that.

[Dville]

Awesome, that works out perfectly!