Admin Page: Site Setup > User Account Settings

This page contains settings useful for customizing the My Account section of your site. For now, the switches deal almost exclusively with the My Account Home Page.

You can select to use either the newer "My Account Page" layout or the older "User Management Home Page" layout. Examples of each are shown below (click on them to see bigger pictures). If choosing the "My Account Home" setting after upgrading from a version of the software prior to 4.0.0RC11, you'll want to make sure you include the (!MY_ACCOUNT_LINKS!) module (shown on the left in the first screenshot below) in the template used on the My Account Home page, so that your users can navigate their account settings. If you installed the software at version 4.0.0RC11 or higher, this is now the default setup, and already done for you.

My Account Home (New)

User Management Home Page (Old)

You can choose which page the user is directed to after they login here…to the user management home page or the site wide home page. Upon successful completion of login the user will be directed to the page you choose.

Here, you can choose the maximum number of rows you would like to appear in information tables on the My Account Page (this setting has no effect if you are using the old User Account Home Page)

The icons that appear alongside entires for addons in the My Account Links module are disabled by default. You can turn them on by checking this box here. Note that we recommend to keep this turned off as it can result in an inconsistent look for my account links, it is mainly provided as a backwards-compatibility option.

Add ability to charge a user $1 (or any amount that you choose), and when payment is received, it shows a "verified" icon next to their username and/or next to the title for any listings the user places. This is done as an anti-spam measure, since most spammers are not willing to pay money to spam a site.

<tip c n>Note that there is a "Verify Account" order item, that charges $1 to verify the user's account. That order item has additional price plan specific settings in Pricing > Price Plans Home > [edit button] > Cost Specifics, such as turning the item off, or changing the price.

Those price plan item settings will only be available if Enable account verification system is enabled (checked). </tip>

See Verified Account System for more information about this feature.

Check this box to enable the account verification system, and to display additional settings available only when enabled.

If checked, anything done by a non-verified account (including anonymous listings), would require admin approval, regardless of the normal price plan item settings. This includes placing listings, editing listings, renewing, upgrading, etc.

You can find the normal "require admin approval" settings that this is over-riding for non-verified accounts, in the admin at:

Pricing > Price Plans Home > [edit button] > Cost Specifics, near the bottom of the page, in the section Price Plan Items.

Note that anything done by a verified account, would continue to follow the normal settings for the price plan for that user mentioned above.

User account verify settings are set as illustrated:

Price plan item settings are set as illustrated:

Result:

User is not yet verified: Everything they do, placing a new listing, editing listings, renewing listings, etc. will require admin approval because it is set to require admin approval for all items for non-verified accounts.

Once user is verified: They can place listings, renew listings, etc without needing admin approval. The only thing that would require admin approval is editing a listing, because that is what is set in the price plan item settings illustrated above. Note that this is just an example, it could just as easily be set so that nothing requires admin approval in the price plan item settings, or however you wish.

When this is checked, if the user pays for anything on the site, they do not need to specifically purchase the "account verification" as it will automatically verify the user. This goes along with the theory that the spammers are not going to be paying for things.

Note that any transactions paid for with account balance do not auto-verify the account. This is because being able to pay with account balance, does not necessarily mean that the user actually paid money: the account could be "going negative", or the account could have started out with a balance, etc.

User Ratings allow site users to rate one another on a scale of 1-5 stars. The listing tag {listing tag='user_rating'} can be used to display the UI for rating the seller of a listing. Functionally, someone viewing the output from that tag will see a graphical representation of the seller's average rating from all users until he clicks on a star to place his own rating. From then forward, he will instead be shown the selected rating for that seller anywhere that seller's rating is shown.

This can be configured to send a warning email to a user and/or the site admin if the user's Average User Rating drops below a set level. To prevent abuse, no Low Rating Threshold messages will be sent until a user has received at least 10 total ratings, and once a user's Average Rating has fallen underneath the threshold, he will receive only a single notification email until his rating is once again above the threshold level.

The My Account Home Page organizes information into what we call, simply, "boxes." Each box shows information related to a different aspect of the software. The checkboxes in this section can be used to turn each box on or off. If a box is turned off, it will not display on the front-side of the site until it is turned on again (though any relevant data, such as which Auctions have recently sold, will still be tracked).

The "Recently Sold" row has a sub-setting that can be used to specify how far back in time (in days) the Recently Sold box looks when finding listings that have been sold. In other words, this setting lets you specify exactly how recent is meant by "Recently."