When a user is added from Dashboard, role gets overwritten with default role

That makes a certain amount of sense. There’s no way for the plugin to tell who sent the email for registration, so it has to default on the side of caution and protect your site (which … well for obvious reasons I don’t want to change that).

I’m not sure if I can change that behavior. As far as WP is concerned, all new users should have a safe default role. Maybe I can tweak it to check if a role is defined in the pre-approval page.

I came up with a quick fix for this unwanted behavior. Basically, default role will get overwritten back to the original role assigned from the Dashboard.

function assign_original_role($user_id, $password, $meta) {
	global $wpdb;
	$user = get_userdata($user_id);
	$email = $user->user_email;
	$query = $wpdb->prepare("SELECT meta from <code>wp_signups</code> where <code>user_email</code> = %s", $email);
	$raw_meta = $wpdb->get_results($query, ARRAY_A);
	$signup_meta = unserialize($raw_meta[0]['meta']);
	if (array_key_exists('new_role', $signup_meta)) {
		$user->set_role($signup_meta['new_role']);
	}
}
add_action('wpmu_activate_user', 'assign_original_role', 99);