CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

hello there.

clickatell does not work unless you have a 'fully qualified' phonenumber i.e

07817 802299 is an example of how most UK people would describe their mobile phone number but clickatell does not like that.

it likes phone numbers with the country code prepended (+44 in the case of the UK). so clickatell likes this: 447817802299

clickatell has an option to autoappend a national code on numbers that are not of that country. but the problem with that is that when a message is received, CiviCRM cannot match it based on phone number because

447817802299 (which is what civicrm is looking for) != 07817802299

So what should we do?

Asking people to fully qualify phone numbers when the enter then is a pain / not realistic.  Automatically adding them when they save is a possibility, though the disadvantage is that people like to see their number as they would expect it / entered it next time they come to editing it.

we could define a default phone country in CiviCRM and auto append it to numbers that we realise are not 'fully qualified'.

asking people for the country of their phone number is another possibility.  we can then have a php function which qualifies a phone number at appropriate times.

The times that we would want to do this are

1) when sending emails (thus avoiding having to use clickatells auto country code adder), and
2) when receiving emails so we can properly match them

finally, we have a client that wants to send SMS to uganda, sierra leone, and south africa so we need a way of dealing with this in a international environment. fun!