Display alert on successful user Sign Up

I think wordpress used to automatically redirect to a page with a message telling a newly registered user to check their email box to activate their account.

For some reason, when a new person registers now, they are automatically redirected to the home page with no alert or message. I've been trying to get wordpress to display an alert to the user after clicking Sign Up with:

add_action('user_register','check_your_email');

function check_your_email(){
    echo script
    alert('There are no fields to generate a report');
    /script;
}

But the function above seems to have no effect at all. How can I display an alert to the user on successful sign up (but before activation?). I've also tried the hook register_new_user but it also has no effect.