How to Address Double Email Confirmation of AWeber & vBulletin

If you Integrate AWeber with vBulletin registration system you may have an issue of double email confirmation. AWeber has always been a confirmed opt-in and if you have your vBulletin settings where users need to confirm email address then when any user registers on your forum he may get double email confirmation, one from AWeber and other from vBulletin.

This was not the case with me at Go4Expert.com because I send AWeber confirmation email as an invite for subscribing to newsletter but that may not be the case with everyone and so here I have a solution for double email confirmation of AWeber & vBulletin.

Let us begin…

Step 1: Stop vBulletin to send email confirmation

Assuming you have email confirmation ON in vBulletin forum you need to stop the email that is sent through the vBulletin system.

Open your register.php file in your forums directory and find the following.

// sort out emails and usergroups
if ($vbulletin->options['verifyemail'])
{
	$activateid = build_user_activation_id($userid, (($vbulletin->options['moderatenewmembers'] OR $vbulletin->GPC['coppauser']) ? 4 : 2), 0);

	eval(fetch_email_phrases('activateaccount'));

	vbmail($email, $subject, $message, true);
}

And comment out the following line

vbmail($email, $subject, $message, true);

Step 2: Configure AWeber to send user data to thank you page

We have stopped the confirmation email to be sent from vBulletin.  Next thing we should do is configure AWeber to pass user data to our thank you page.

Go to your AWeber list Settings page and provide thank you page URL and check on the box which says “Pass subscriber info”. This way we can get user data on our thank you page where we will confirm the user in vBulletin.

Step 3: Your thank you page to confirm user

Upload thankyou.php into your forums root directory which will confirm the user when user clicks on the confirm link in AWeber. This has been tested to work with vBulletin 3.7+

Step 4: Hide some un-functional options in registration (Optional)

Optionally you may want to hide the option of “Receive Email from Admin” so user may not un-check that. If he un-checks it will have no effect in AWeber and so it is better to hide such options which can confuse the user.

<tr>
 <td>$vbphrase[administrators_may_send_email]</td>
</tr>
<tr>
 <td><label for="cb_adminemail"><input type="checkbox" name="options[adminemail]" value="1" id="cb_adminemail" $checkedoff[adminemail] />$vbphrase[receive_email_from_bulletin_board_staff]</label></td>
</tr>

You can remove the above code and replace that with

<div style="visibility:hidden"><label for="cb_adminemail"><input type="checkbox" name="options[adminemail]" value="1" id="cb_adminemail" $checkedoff[adminemail] />$vbphrase[receive_email_from_bulletin_board_staff]</label></div>

Future improvements

This is not just a plain plug-in but it needs a single line of change in code in core vBulletin file “register.php”.

More Issues…

If you have any issues do post them in comments and I will be more than happy to help you get it working for you.

Try Aweber for $1 and see what it can do for your Forum

Tagged as: AWeber, CMS, vBulletin

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Further Reading:

1. Integrate AWeber with vBulletin
2. Integrate AWeber with vBulletin Registration
3. Integrate AWeber with Joomla
4. Integrate AWeber with phpBB
5. Stop vBulletin Spam Part II