CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We recently had someone inquire about the status of their event registration and had to investigate. Here's what we found.

The individual had completed an online event registration form exposed by Civi. The individual filled out all of their information and attempted to pay by credit card. After submitting, reviewing, and confirming, we THINK the individual got back a transaction declined message that he apparently didn't notice (hence, his inquiry about the status of his registration). All fine and as expected to this point, other than we may want to better highlight the declined message.

So when the individual inquired about his registration status (because he didn't receive any confirmation email, as expected), we went to investigate what happened. We found, that a new contact record was created in Civi for the individual. He already had a contact record in Civi, but he used a different email address unknown to Civi, so it created a new record for him. We looked at the record to determine what had happened and there was no information that we could find that indicated he had attempted to register for an event. No failed contribution record. No pending from incomplete transaction registration record. No activity records.

So, to come to the conclusion we did, we had to walk through and try to replicate this same result, which we were able to. But we can't know for certain that's what happened because Civi doesn't provide us with the data to point to that.

I wanted to share this experience to:

1) Possibly help anyone that might run into the same thing.
2) See if others have experienced this and what they've done, if anything to improve the situation.
3) Ask the questions and start a conversation: Is this by design? If so, what is the reason? Why not create some kind of failed contribution or a pending registration?

Cheers!

Something else that would be super useful is to put more information in the source field of the contact (eg. 'online registration for event XY').

So at least when you see the duplicate contact, you know where it comes from.

X+

There have been posts on the forum which have expressed the opposite view (we do create contacts for all cases if u r using something like paypal standard) and dont want contacts created if the contribution has not been processed. It also potentially increases the number of "spam contacts" you have in your DB (depending on how popular your site is)

eileen's forum post was referring to the recurring contribution bit where we delete the contribution (i think)

in the normal case, we dont create a contact or a contribution. If someone is interested in this, would be good to submit a patch ALONG with a few unit/web tests that ensure that things work as expected

lobo

In the case I described, the contact record was created. And that seems logical in my opinion. I agree with Eileen. I think it's important to capture contact information in almost all cases (with the exception of spam) because the individual trying to register for event or apply for a membership or donate or just filling out a form to contact the organization is a prospect at some level.

What is difficult to wrap my head around is that there is no indication of why or how that particular contact record was created as I see a contact record with no source and no other related records. Possible options to improve this would be to provide a value for the contact source, a failed contribution record, a pending registration, etc.

Lobo, as I indicated in the issue tracker, I'm not in a place to contribute code right now due to time constraints and learning curve. Though I am getting closer to pushing things aside to make time as I genuinely want to contribute in that way to improving Civi. Any resources available to help bring potential developers up to speed quickly?