CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I just discovered this and I am a little heartbroken.

Each night as the curtain goes up on one of our performances, I update the status of all the participants to either "Attended", "No-Show", or "Cancelled".  However I just realized that by doing so the registration_date of each participant record is also updated. (At least on both my 3.1.5 install and the 3.2 sandbox.)

As a result, I have lost thousands of records of what I consider very valuable marketing data: Who buys tickets in advance?  Who buys day-of or at the door?  Which marketing campaigns resulted in more advanced sales?  And so on.  Instead, the database shows every participant of each event having registered at the exact same date and time.

Is there a reason for this behavior?  To confess, I find it so bizarre and unexpected that I kind of figure there must be some great benefit that I'm just not thinking of. 

The DB description of the civicrm_participant.register_date field is "When did contact register for event?".  If it is being deliberately overwritten every time the record is modified, perhaps referring to it as modification_date would be more helpful.

Anybody else out there hate this behavior?  Love it?  I'm really curious.