Auto-Upgrading users in WordPress

I made a small site recently where I wanted all newly registered users from a specific email domain to automatically be administrators (this is a terrible idea, don’t do it).  The user registration was restricted by Single-Sign-On and 2-Factor Authentication, so I felt relatively safe doing this, especially since it was only a “for fun” project.

The interesting bit of code that upgraded users to admins is as follows:

add_action( 'user_register', 'upgrade_email_to_admin', 10, 1 );
function upgrade_email_to_admin( $user_id ) {
$user = get_user_by( 'ID', $user_id );
if ( false !== $user ) {
$email = $user->data->user_email;

   // Only example.com please.
    if ( false === strpos( $email, '@example.com' ) ) {
        return;
    }

    $roles = $user->roles;

    if ( ! in_array( 'administrator', $roles, true ) ) {
        $user_update = array();
        $user_update['ID'] = $user_id;
        $user_update['role'] = 'administrator';
        wp_update_user( $user_update );
    }
}
Code language: PHP (php)

This is 100% insecure, please do not do this 🙂