Sadly in your case or your friends case this is really how the registration works for now, accounts can only be regged by the users themselves, moderators, admins or any staff are unable to do so for you.
There's not much point in sitting and refreshing the page every minute since I believe it opens first in the start of an hour and it also remains open for a few hours as mentioned above. Best is to check in once every few hours and see if anything has changed.