I have been looking through examples of email activation on rails and most examples just have a column for activation token and confirmed in their user table. I am not sure but I don't think that this is a good idea as when a user is activated almost both those columns seems like a waste. The way I was thinking of doing activation was having a seperate model called Activation which would have_one :user a ONE-WAY association and I would set the role of the user in my site as "PENDING" or something similar. The activation table would hold an activation token(s) per user. Then a link would be generated with the activation token(s) and the user would be sent an email containing something like www.mysite.com/activate?token='some_really_long_hash'. Upon clicking the link the role of my user would be set to "MEMBER" or something similar. Does this seem like a good idea? I can't conceive any pitfalls of activation this way. Suggestions? Comments?
It sounds like you're at the intro stages of implementing a state machine design pattern on your user model, and no it isn't a bad approach to design. Its just more complicated than what most people need.
I think the State Machine Plugin might be the type of approach you're looking to perform. Obviously this might be more than you're looking for but the approach would be the same.
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Good Luck!