I'm set as the account for users to automatically friend. It seems that this can stop working, or be intermittent.

When I set my account, it shows up properly as "Matt Marlor" but then when checking this out, I note it being show as "Matt+Marlor". Not sure if that's related.

Anyone else noticed a problem with auto-friend? If you're using it, of course?

This is fine. This is just a javascript encoding issue with the display value.


We have had this setup on activesocial.com since we added the feature. I've never noticed any problems and I get several new friends (spammers) each day. What makes you think it isn't working? Do you see the journal entry for the friend join? I've noticed that some people will immediately remove me, but then the journal entry will remain.

Re Matt+Marlor - fair enough - wasn't sure :-)

Yeah, I thought of the journal entry and it was the first thing I checked. If it showed that they'd friended me I wouldn't worry and I'd just think that they had removed me. In this case though, nothing showing - seems intermittent, and no errors in the site logs.

Will - just a thought - if someone deleted the welcome message without reading it, could that possibly affect it?

I just realised that it also doesn't send the welcome email when it happens.

Interestingly, there's no errors relating to it in the site error log either - thought it could've been an exception, but no.

Matt,
Can you create a support ticket for this issue? Also, please provide a couple usernames for which you know this problem occurred. Really sounds like something is failing during the registration process.

No probs Will - done.

Ok. I think I may have it figured out now, thanks to one of the users getting in touch with me while signing up.

The Twitter, Facebook, and Linked-In fields are exposed at signup. These are all asURL fields, but a lot of users try to enter just their username (eg. @ohcrap for me on Twitter). I believe this is then causing an exception and they don't complete the normal registration process.

I would suggest that the fix is to validate these URLs before progressing to the next page. I'd suggest a button saying Validate, with the ability to progress to the next screen disabled until it's validated.

During the validation process, if a user has not entered a valid URL, you could perhaps have 2 possible behaviours, configurable via options;

1. The registration reports "This is not a valid URL. You should enter the full URL of your profile", or
2. The registration automatically prepends the URL for Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIN accordingly.

I will, of course, update my ticket with this as well. Would be great to get this eliminated once and for all!

Matt,
Thanks for the update. The idea behind using the asURL datatype is so that it will accept the various formats and parse them appropriately. We will do some testing, but sounds like you have tracked down the problem.

Thanks,
Will

Thanks heaps Will. Hoping it's easy to duplicate now.

Unfortunately, after doing more testing it appears these items aren't related. The auto friend is executed in two places. First place it would be executed is after the first sign up page if verified registration is disabled. The second place would be after the account is verified. I have added some additional logging to AS 1.8.3 to see if we can track down this problem.

Awesome - thanks Will. We'll get there

Should it be logging in the site log viewer? Still just seeing New User event. Not sure if this user has completed the verification process.