CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I upgraded to 4.1.5 a month ago, but just now noticed this, regarding deduplication rules:

It appears I have several new dedupe Individual rules, and they are marked as 'default', in addition to the dedupe rules I had set up previously. So now I have two Individual Strict dedupe rules , and two Individual Fuzzy dedupe rules. (There's also another new individual strict rule, but it's not a default).

Furthermore, the new Strict Individual Dedupe rule works on only the email address- this is exactly what I DONT want! I set up my deduplication rule to work on First Name + Last Name + ( Email OR Birthdate ) , because parents sometimes put in their own email address for their kids; and the previous record gets wiped out.

My inclination is to resolve this by going in at the database and removing the new dedupe rules.

What was the idea with adding these, and making them the defaults? Will I be royally screwing up some well-thought-out plan if I do that? I realize that having unique email addresses for all contacts is a great 'best practice.' But in some situations, it's just not practical. And introducing it in an upgrade, after existing default dedupe rules are established, seems a little off; and the result that there are two default rules ( for Strict, Individual) doesn't make any sense.

There is no way to delete the custom dedupe rules- or manage them- once they've become default.
This is a fundamental flaw.
I'm looking at digging into the db to delete. PITA