Activate Pending Members

Control Panel Location:  Admin > Members and Groups > Activate Pending Members

The Activate Pending Members section of the Control Panel allows you to activate any members that have registered and are pending activation.

Activate Members Page

Why Are Members Pending?

There are two circumstances under which a member might be considered "pending":

  1. The user has not activated their account by clicking the link in the "activation email" they were sent upon registering. Normally, when someone registers for a membership account, the system sends them an email containing a special link that must be clicked in order to activate their account. If they have not clicked the link their account will remain as pending, which means they won't be able to log-in or utilize member's only aspects of your site. You may disable "self-activation" or change it to "admin activation" at:

    Admin > Members and Groups > Membership Preferences

  2. Your site requires Admin activation. You may optionally set up your membership system to require that an administrator manually review and activate membership accounts manually at:

    Admin > Members and Groups > Membership Preferences

Activate/Delete Selected Members

The pull-down menu at the bottom of the activation page allows you to either activate or delete members you have selected using the checkboxes on the right. When a member is activated what you are really doing is changing the Member Group they are assigned to. By default ExpressionEngine uses the Members group for activation but you can set a different group for this purpose at:

Admin > Members and Groups > Membership Preferences

Send Email Notification

The checkbox at the bottom of the page causes one of two emails to be sent, informing the user of your decision, based on whether you are activating or deleting the account. Each of the two emails is stored as a template, which can be edited in the Specialty Templates area of the Control Panel, located here:

Admin > Email Notification Templates > Email Notification Templates

The two templates are:

  1. Member Account Validation Notification
  2. Member Account Decline Notification

Top of Page

User Contributed Notes

Posted by: Chad Crowell on 18 December 2008 11:18pm
Chad Crowell's avatar

Note that the Activation Links sent out by EE are valid for 24 hours.  After that, any member clicking their activation link will get an “Activation Request Error” message.  Solutions?  Manually activate the member or use the Resend Activation Link tool in the Member Administration submenu of any member account.

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