The "Thousand ways to break TWikiRegistration" contest

This is a contest where you can win by revealing bugs in the TWikiRegistration process. Seriously, instead of proposing how to fix it, I'd like you all to waste some brain to collect any bug that breaks registrating a new account on a TWiki site. The rules are simple: imagine a public TWiki site where new users are supposed to register. They should be allowed to create an account and be able to edit their hometopic afterwards. Now, find any way to put a rock in that road. You need to describe exactly how to set up TWiki in such a way. The winner is who finds the most absurd bug. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to take part in this challenge, even though I had a really really bad time recently to find out what was going on.

-- Contributors: MichaelDaum - 20 Mar 2007

Discussion

I was dealing with one recently: try restricting view access to the Main web. You can make it work, but it takes a lot of fiddling with permissions on various topics touched during the registration process. If you don't get it completely right, the registration process fails at some point part way through the process, maybe having added new user to TWikiUsers but not creating user topic, or creating a blank user topic, etc.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 20 Mar 2007

Another rather common scenario i've seen is where users click the submit button on the validation page twice (probably as a result of lag time in server responding). Then they get an error saying the validation code is not good (because it's already been processed) and contact you saying the registration doesn't work. Usually, the registration was processed and you just have to tell them to go ahead and log in. Still it's not a good first impression.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 20 Mar 2007

On access and registration, the quickest way around it is

In Main/WebPreferences
   Set ALLOWWEBCHANGE = TWikiAdminGroup, TWikiRegistrationAgent
   Set ALLOWWEBRENAME = TWikiAdminGroup, TWikiRegistrationAgent

No new user required, just modification of default entry.

-- KwangErnLiew - 21 Mar 2007