CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Something disturbing seems to have happened which I cannot figure out, or duplicate.

I made a profile called "volunteer interest form" and every so often someone fills one out, I get notified by e-mail and I follow up.  I got another e-mail notification and called the number in the form that arrived in the e-mail message and was very surprised that when I asked for David S. I was instead talking to David C. a contact I interact with frequently and most definitely not David S. who filled out the form.  Very odd.  When I investigated I saw that David S.'s info had written over info in David C.'s record.  It was David C.'s record, his list of donations, activities, his work address etc, but the change log reveled that his account had been modified by himself.  It now had David S.'s last name, e-mail address and the custom fields entered on the volunteer interest form.

What I would expect and hope to happen is the form generates a new record unless it catches a match, when it updates it.  I have it set to Update contact on a duplicate match. 

So I went back and tested it.  It's not able to handle a new contact - it just throws this error: The requested Profile (gid=) is disabled, OR there is no Profile with that ID, OR a valid 'gid=' integer value is missing from the URL.  This error happens regardless of whether the redirect URL is filled in or not (tested it both ways).

I also cannot make it merge in other data on top of an existing record.  I have no idea how David S. pulled this off.

So I am thinking I've missed a step or two.  Can you tell me what I should be looking at here?

Thanks in advance.

http://www.railvermont.org/administrator/index2.php?option=com_civicrm&task=civicrm/group/search&&_qf_Select_display=true&qfKey=[deleted]

[I deleted the key in the above URL]

I don't think I changed the duplicate matching, but in any case I just went and checked the settings and it shows e-matching set to strict and last name to fuzzy.  That is what is confusing me, as David S. entered a new e-mail which overwrote David C.'s e-mail.  I can't tell from the change log how this happened, perhaps it was a multi-step process.  I also checked the Joomla users, but neither are registered joomla users.

This problem of a new contact record overwriting a record with the same last name has happened again.  (both times, with important constituents!).  The original record was a donor, C. N.  Now I'm teaching him how to use civiCRM, so we opened up his record, using the search box in the menu and I became alarmed when I noticed some of C.N.'s information in fields that B.N. had no info.  It seems that a new record was NOT created when B.N.'s information was entered. 

B.N.'s information also came from the same problematic front-end profile for volunteers: http://railvermont.org/sign-up-to-volunteer.html
That is Joomla's re-write of: index.php?option=com_civicrm&view=Profiles&layout=edit
This link is what is shown in Joomla's menu item under Alias, but that page also shows the link to "Volunteer Interest Form," which is the custom form I created (which is indeed seen from the front end)

 e-matching set to strict and last name to fuzzy.