Are you using a plugin that allows registration via external accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)? If yes, I'm guessing that this plugin conflicts with walled-garden mode. So, I would suggest to disable any such plugin to see if this solves the issue. If you can verify that a plugin is causing the issue, the next step would be to fix the issue in this plugin, i.e. allow for compatibility with walled-garden mode.

Thank you for your fast reply.

I'm using gdocs file previewer and friend request 1.5 as activated non-standard plugins. Deactivating friend request didn't help. The twitter core plugin is deactivated because "of missing dependencies".

There are some other plugins installed but all deactivated...

I'm running out of email addresses for test sign ups; do you know how to reset the "this email address has beend used" before thing?

You can delete unvalidated accounts at http://yoursite/admin/users/unvalidated

Even If a user is deleted it seems that the address used for the initial signup is remembered by elgg and can't be used for further sign ups :-(

The "unvalidatede" url didn't work for me...even with inserting /admin/

But really thx for your efforts!

Log in to your site, go to Administration. On the right menu, under Administration, go to Users > Unvalidated. Find your test users and delete them.

If you delete a user, the email address should be available again for registration. If this is not the case at your site, surely something is wrong. How do you delete the users?

As Steve said, you can delete unvalidated users via the admin section. The option is available on the same page that also allows manually avtivating them.

If you use this friend_request plugin: http://community.elgg.org/plugins/728303/1.5/friend-requests-elgg-18, I would suggest to disable it to see if it resolves your issue. I think this plugin is outdated. You could use this one instead: http://community.elgg.org/plugins/384965/3.2/friend-request.

Hi iionly,

I've disabled the friend request plugin and it didn't help.

I deleted all the users from the admin section, my validated and unvalidated testusers accounts. But ELGG doesn't give the used email adresses free, it just tells me, that the address has been in used in the past and blocks a new registration with that email address :-(. 

Now I disabled the email validation; Users can sign up and even don't need a manual approval anymore. I thought disabling the email validation would lead to the need of a manual approval by the admin account...?

Hm, I just tested registration with uservalidationbyemail plugin disabled. I was quite surprised about the automatic activation, too. I also thought it would require manual activation when no validation email is sent. I guess the behaviour has been changed at some point (Elgg 1.7 ---> Elgg 1.8?).

I still can't reproduce what you say about email addresses of deleted accounts being blocked. If I delete an account I can use the email address to register again without problems regardless if this account had belonged to an activated or unactivated account. Are you sure you didn't test the registration using an email address belonging to a still existing account?

I'm checking later on that blocked eMail addresses issues again and report here...