Force Form Submitters to Verify Their E-mail

This article explains how to force form submitters to verify their E-mail address.

Introduction

It is possible to force site visitors to confirm their email address when they submit a form.

The only required form field to do this is 'Email (reply-to)'. To switch on this functionality tick the 'Verification Required' checkbox under the AutoResponse Email heading.

This results in; when a user fills in the form and submits it, they are sent the customisable autoresponse email with a link they can click to confirm their email address. Where this link points to can be set under the 'AutoResponse Email' heading in the form configuration screen (Stage 1). The link to this page will be added by default to the bottom of the autoresponse email, unless it contains the placeholder %VerificationLink%, in which case the link will be inserted in the place of the placeholder.

When a website visitor fills in the form the submission is stored in the Sitekit CMS database as an 'unverified' submission, and an email is sent to the email address set to receive notifications in the form configuration stating so. When the user verifies their email address another email is sent to the notification recipient to notify them that the email address has been verified, and the Sitekit CMS database shall reflect this, marking the submission as being verified (and marking the time at which this happens with a datestamp).

The Email Address Verification feature allows a Sitekit CMS user to require that form submitters verify their email address by clicking a link in a subsequent email. The Sitekit user can specify the text of the email containing the verification link, and has to select the page to display to the verifying form submitter.

In addition to the notification email sent upon each submission of the form, a subsequent email is sent when the submitter's email address is verified. The date (& time) of the verification is recorded in the database, and is displayed when a Sitekit CMS user views or exports the form submission.

Configuration

• Click "Create new form", or click "Configure" for an existing form
• Configure the form as required, ensuring that:
• the appropriate page is selected, or text entered, to display "on successful submission".
• the "Auto-Response" text is suitably entered, e.g. with an explanation of the need to verify the submitter's email address. A placeholder can be used here (“%VerificationLink%”) to insert the verification link into the “Auto-Response” email. Otherwise, the verification link is automatically added at the end.
• the "Verification Required" checkbox is checked.
• the appropriate "Verification Confirmation Page" is selected to display upon successful verification
• the form includes an "Email (reply to)" element, with its "required" checkbox checked.
  This is essential as this will be the email address to be verified by the submitter.

Submissions

Submissions can viewed and exported in the normal way, but will contain an additional field: "Verified".This field will contain the date & time that the submitter verified their email address, or it will be blank if they have not yet done so.