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Author Topic: Civi generating 'spurious' contacts  (Read 437 times)

clarkac

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Civi generating 'spurious' contacts
December 05, 2013, 05:52:50 am
The admin for my client contacted me to ask why instead of her name against the contacts that she has created and updated activities for, she's seeing just her email address.  This is on 4.3.8.  Following up, I can see that Civi appears to have created 5 contacts (with only her email address) that are otherwise empty except that they all have one or more activities against them.  In an exceedingly rash moment I deleted these contacts (through the UI), which then caused a problem as there were now activities with no source_contact_id.  Which I then fixed...  The created contact type is an individual, which happens to be wrong because we are using sub-types.  Looking at the db table I can see one of these created just yesterday.
I have seen this problem with another client, with 43 of these extra contact records ! -  but in this case with no activities.
In both cases the user in question is an authenticated Drupal user. 
I am at a loss as to how to track this problem down.... very frustrating.  Ideas, anyone?
« Last Edit: December 05, 2013, 05:57:51 am by clarkac »
Andy Clark

joanne

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Re: Civi generating 'spurious' contacts
December 05, 2013, 01:49:29 pm
Do you have two websites sharing the one Civi DB?  We had problems with multiple account creations at one stage which I believe stemmed from that.

clarkac

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Re: Civi generating 'spurious' contacts
December 05, 2013, 01:52:18 pm
No, we have the usual setup of one system on one shared hosting server.  I wonder whether this is something to do with users not logging off (as I have observed them) but that's only a guess, and probably a bad one.
Andy Clark

clarkac

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Re: Civi generating 'spurious' contacts
March 22, 2014, 10:14:24 am
This problem still exists and I can see several users who have a contact record with their name on it, and also one or more contact records with just their email address - no name.  One user - the prime user - has a contact record with her name, and a further nineteen contact records with just her email address and no name.  Most of these apparently spurious contact records have a bunch of valid activities that the contact has created. One thing these users have in common is that they all create quite a few activities.  I wonder whether there is something they are doing when creating activities that also creates another spurious contact record with their email address on it?  Any suggestions on how to track this down?
Andy Clark
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