Help, Confirmation of e-mail address not being received. Can we auto-register people?

[stuart_brandom]

Hello there,

I've had some complaints from students that they're not receiving announcement notification e-mails, and on further investigation, it would appear that their e-mail address has not been confirmed and they never fully registered.

The problem we've found is that the students aren't receiving a registration link due to the way their usernames are added into Canvas (through our University registry system), so the problem is a bigger issue than I had realised and we've got potentially hundreds of students not receiving notifications.

I know the manual solution would be to ask the students to confirm their e-mail address in their account settings.  But I find this is too clunky and people might not do it or need further help.

Is there a way that we can automatically setup students so that they don't have to register their e-mail address manually?

Or is there other solutions possible to get around this problem?

Thanks  

[BethCrook]

In my experience, this is definitely something that your LMS admin and CSM (Customer Success Manager) at Canvas can work through together.  We set our users up in advance with a bulk CSV upload. 

Through trial and error, the one tip we learned that I can provide is to assure that the users email addresses are created first before the bulk upload or you will risk bounce backs and dead emails after school starts.  Took us a year or two to finally figure out what was happening and correct our process on our end.

[stuart_brandom]

Thank you Beth for responding.

Canvas support have been very useful and have given me an option to try.

It involves a SIS import that will hopefully fix current users.  I'll post up the solution once I've got it all fixed.

[stuart_brandom · Accepted solution]

Canvas support have been very helpful with this and given me a solution to fix current users.

These are the words from support;

I first ran a provisioning report for users, then I isolated just one person in a spreadsheet, after which I modified the file and deleted a few columns that were not necessary for the SIS Import "users.csv". I then ran this File in beta and test and checked the boxes "Override UI changes" AND "Clear UI-changed state" so Canvas thought this person was imported via SIS. 

Once I ran the file the communication channel for email then became "Active" and so if you were do to this for all your users it would make Canvas think they were created via SIS and make all the communication channels active. 

This however is a bandaid fix... If we keep adding users manually or making Canvas think that then this will have to be done many times..

I ran this solution on a few courses and it works a charm.

Thank you to Parley from Canvas support.

[lgekeler]

I can't comment about how this solution worked 2 years ago, but today this solution no longer works on Canvas. The blue box remains after SIS import (viewed in clean browser using "Act As")

[GregSteele]

We are currently trying to fix this. we switched to create user accounts by API without setting the user[skip_registration] and communication_channel[skip_confirmation]. So users not communication_channel comfirmed can not be manually enrolled by email, must use login_Id or SIS_id instead, and not registered they do not receive email from canvas and still needd to to follow communication_channel confirmation.

The above solution still partly works of re-importing the user feed with the email does make the
communication_channel.workflow_state=active
but it does not change the user.workflow_state from "pre-registered" to "registered" which is why the user still has to complete the email validation process.

If anyone knows a way to change this value without having to delete then undelete users we would be happy to here from you.

The user.workflow_state is one of the many fields not exposed in the API, nor editable after creation which makes supporting this system **bleep** impossible. Bring back Blackboard Self-hosted where I could have fixed this issue created by another team in minutes!