Email confirmation for multiple participants

[John.K]

This is just a check to see if what is happening is really the desired functionality.

When someone is registering for an event (the 'primary participant') and booking in additional people - everyone gets an email confirmation saying that they have been booked on to the event.

Personally I would expect only the primary participant to receive the confirmation email, and not everyone that had been registered. Surely only the person doing the booking should receive communication about all the bookings; ie: I would also expect only the primary participant to receive an email confirmation if one of the other people they registered was 'cancelled' on the event. As it stands only the person who gets cancelled receives an email notification.

In short - shouldn't all email communication to do with event participation only go to the primary participant, the person who is doing the booking. This should at least be a configurable option?

(As an edge case, what if someone was being booked on to an event as a birthday surprise! They would get an email confirmation!)

In the case that an email address is not collected for 'additional' participants, no-one is sent a confirmation email when the secondary participant is cancelled. Again, shouldn't the logic be that the email would go to the person who booked them in?

--

Edit: I can see where it is useful to send these email confirmations to everyone (ie: everyone gets a copy of the itinerary / event information. But this should be configurable, perhaps in three ways:

1 - Admin can set 'Send confirmations to everyone'
2 - Admin can optionally allow primary participant to override this setting when booking the event if they only want themselves to be emailed
3 - Admin can set 'Send confirmations only to the primary participant'

[BrightBold]

Wow, just ran across this too and I was really surprised. In addition to the "what if it was supposed to be a surprise" scenario, what if the person changes their mind about who to bring as guests after she has purchased tickets? What if she doesn't want her guests to know what she paid for the tickets?

I wholeheartedly support the three options suggested by John.

In the meantime, can anyone suggest workarounds? The only one I can think of is that it looks like there is a different email template for guests than for the primary participant (since there are a few fields on the primary email that don't appear on guests'), or some logic in that template to differentiate between the two, and that at least the guest template could be edited not to include price and tax-deduction information. But I would like to turn this off altogether if possible, so would appreciate any ideas as to how to modify this behavior.

[Donald Lobo]

Agreed. Making this flexible would be awesome and benefit CiviEvent nicely

Any chance either of you could contribute a patch for this and/or sponsor development of this. I suspect its a 15-25 hour project with tests and documentation

Your workaround for now might be to implement the alterEmail hook and suppress additional emails and u'll need to maintain some state about what emails were sent etc

lobo

[BrightBold]

Unfortunately I'm not currently in a position to either patch or sponsor (still working on my back-end skills, and I'm in a one-person Drupal shop implementing CiviCRM for a pro bono project so don't have $$$), but if I work out anything good I will report back.

Currently I've gone with modifying the message template to use different language for the primary and non-primary attendees, using a lot of {if $isPrimary} to hide things we don't want the guests to see. This mostly works except I can't find a working variable for the payee name (documented in http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,32274.0.html) so where their ticket came from is still a mystery. If I can get that figured out, this is a decent stopgap solution - it solves most of my concerns above except for the birthday surprise, which in our case is fairly hypothetical.