CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Do you have two different contact records for John Doe OR one contact record with two event registration (participant) records? If you have two separate contact records, you should be able to modify the first name on one of them without changing the other. Otherwise you'll need to create a new contact record for Jane Doe and then register her for the event.

Separately - can you describe your setup in detail, since we should be able to prevent this from happening.
- what options are checked under Configure Event >> Registration
- I assume you have one or more profiles including in your event registration form? what fields are included...
- are you using default settings for Find and Match Duplicate Contacts - Strict rule for individual? If not, what are your settings?

If you include a link to registration form for your event, that would also help me understand.

Jon - Finally got around to doing some tests, and I can't figure out a way to absolutely prevent someone from putting in the same name for multiple participants :-( You could try clarifying this with the field help in your profile. If that doesn't work, then might be best to disable the "Allow multiple registrations from same email address" option.

There appears to be just the one contact record.  How would I go about creating the 2nd record and then associating one of the registrations from John Doe so that he ends up with just the one?

There's no way to "move" a registration from one person to another (other than messing around in the DB directly). So you'll need to do the following:
- Create the 2nd contact record (New Individual) - of course you'll need their actual name
- Register them for the event (w/o checking Record Payment - since their fee is already covered)
- Find the existing registration for John Doe that is NOT associated with the online payment (when you view this one, there is NO Contribution record displayed) - and delete this registration record

 

If you can upgrade to 3.0, then you can create and use a different profile for the Additional Participant screen - which then allows you to put "help" messages on the name field which clarify this. Otherwise, you can just put help on your main profile which clarifies both situations... Something like - "If you are registering Additional Participants, use their name here rather than entering your own name multiple names." (or I'm sure you can come up with something better :-) ).