FreakAuth: what about adding users through a csv file?

[eluser]Grahack[/eluser]
For a personal project, I'd like to invite a few hundreds of people on a website. Just to keep things centralized, I thought about creating a user for each and everyone, then send them a nice email through my app.

Of course I'm using FAL, and I'll try to do that with an upload file field. The csv will be parsed and each line will create a user. The csv file will be uploaded, parsed, then deleted.

I need some neat thoughts that I could have missed (I know you doubt it's even possible), so please add your 2 cents about any of the following points, or even a new one!

1) they won't be able to choose their username
2) I have to create random easy passwords
3) no mean to know when the user is really created
4) some hints about the csv format must be given to the admin uploading a file

answers:

1) I'll change usernames manually for those who want
2) they'll be able to change their password at any time
3) not a big deal, or I could set a timestamp=0 here just to remember they were added with a csv
4) user name, email, pwd, role, country*
* if country is used

Last point, the UI. I thought about just a new field (upload file) in the 'add user' page + csv format hints.

Thanks for your valuable time.

[eluser]Pascal Kriete[/eluser]
Ok, I don't actually use FAL and as such voted, that I don't 'really' care, but from an objective point of view:

1) depends on how much information I have on them - if I knew their names i would do something like f.lastname. If some has huge objections it can be dealt with on an individual basis.
2) create a random password, ask them to change it when they first login
3) not so sure what you mean by this - after running the script I'll see if the user was created in the db; and I know if they've logged in, because they'll change their password
4) username, email, random password, anything else I need

Can't say anything about the last point as I don't use it.

[eluser]jpeffer[/eluser]
[quote author="Grahack" date="1202478410"]For a personal project, I'd like to invite a few hundreds of people on a website. Just to keep things centralized, I thought about creating a user for each and everyone, then send them a nice email through my app.

Of course I'm using FAL, and I'll try to do that with an upload file field. The csv will be parsed and each line will create a user. The csv file will be uploaded, parsed, then deleted.

I need some neat thoughts that I could have missed (I know you doubt it's even possible), so please add your 2 cents about any of the following points, or even a new one!

1) they won't be able to choose their username
2) I have to create random easy passwords
3) no mean to know when the user is really created
4) some hints about the csv format must be given to the admin uploading a file


Thanks for your valuable time.[/quote]


Here are my 'knee jerk' thoughts on the subject. You could use the activation system as a means to help kick off account creation. Upon initial login simply have the user then create their password. You could decide at this point to allow them to create a unique username as well, or you could simply use the Email address for authentication and create a free form display name. Since you already have their Email address I would use that as the starting point. Using activation, followed by password creation at a later time, would remove the need to generate simple passwords since the account will simply be temp until they decide to activate. This should lead to the following answers to your questions:

Answers:
1.) Allow them to create a unique username after activating or use an unrestricted display name and the Email address for login.
2.) No passwords need to be generated using an authentication link
3.) User will be created when the user activates
4.) You could always just upload a delimited file containing Email addresses only

Hope this helps.