Notification for email verification: notifications should include a more useful message so users understand what they are seeing

[sbarbosadataverse]

We are getting unnecessary emails about failed email verifications from users creating accounts, when this is a known bug/issue.
It would help mediate support tickets in RT if we added a note that assured users that their emails were verified so they don't continue to send tickets to support.

[sbarbosadataverse]

@djbrooke do you think this is something we can enhance the messaging for, sooner rather than later?

[pdurbin]

In 904a4e7 I fixed a bug having to do with two browsers. This is in pull request #8579

Imagine the following scenario:

• You are logged into Dataverse from your desktop browser. You click the button to send a verification email.
• On your phone, you get the email verification link and tap it. On your phone's browser you see "success, verified'.
• Back on your desktop browser, it still shows not verified.

In the fix above, I made it so we look up the user more often to know the latest of if it's verified or not.

[pdurbin]

In dc03e3d (also in pull request #8579) I attempted to expose more information to the user about any errors with processing their email verification token. I don't expect a huge benefit from this because the page will most often say "Invalid token" for a non-existent or expired token. It looks like this:

I also added more logging in server.log for sysadmins. Users can't see this, of course, but maybe it will help with troubleshooting.

[pdurbin]

@sbarbosadataverse there are a lot of good fixes in pull request #8579 and I've marked it to close this issue when it gets merged.

I looked through old RT tickets from November until now and noticed that several users reported receiving the same nonsensical email I did when I clicked "Verify Email". There's no link, nothing to do. Here's a screenshot.

Here are all the cases of this I found in RT:

• https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=316215
• https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=315336
• https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=312844
• https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=312844
• https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=312043

For a lot of the other RT tickets, the exchange often went like this:

• User: I'm having trouble confirming my email.
• Support: It's buggy and you don't need to anyway.
• User: Ok thanks (or crickets)

The thing I learned from working with user (and @kcondon ) on the ticket you gave me ( https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=318230 ) is that the user was seeing "Not Verified" but the database showed the email was verified. The "look up the user more often" fix I mentioned above should help with this.

Obviously, if the pull request gets merged and deployed to Harvard Dataverse and we still are seeing lots of support tickets, let's open a new issue and work on the next round of bugs.