CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi
I have a completely new setup of CiviCRM (Drupal), and I'm adding membership and donations pages before going live.
I have no problems with the CiviContribute setup, the front-end pages work fine, the profiles are there, the payment processor is set up, but unfortunately the email address field is ungovernable.
Having included an email field in each profile, member and donate, the pages then had the email field within the payment option area, not the profile, and as a required field.
I need it to be a required field in the membership signup form, but not on the donations page. I would like it to be under the name and address, not under the contribution options.
Whatever I've tried, it always came up as a required field, so for the donations page I removed the profile altogether, and just had the set of contribution options. When viewing the live web page, lo and behold the email field came up just after the contribution options, and as a required field.
How do I turn this off please? It's of importance to the new project that donors be able to contribute anonymously. I'd like to have the contribution options followed by a set of fields that can be entered if the donor wants to give details, but which aren't required. That's entirely achievable so far except for the pesky email field.
Is there a simple solution? Or is CiviCRM structured so that you absolutely have to register at least an email to make a contribution - i.e. anonymous donations are disallowed?
Thanks
JAL

Hi
I thought it was the case that CiviCRM needs a contact field input to work. And after all, if I want to set up anonymous donations, I can always just add a Paypal donate button to the site - but then, CiviCRM won't record and report the contributions.
It's quite important that people should be able to donate as anonymously as possible. Some people don't want to give out their email addresses readily, as they don't want to be spammed, but are happier giving out their online nickname than their email.
On the understanding that CiviCRM was ensuring that at least one contact field was used, I therefore set up a profile with the First Name field required, but the email not required. When seen in the preview on the profiles page it comes up right, with the first name field required, and the email not.
I then added this profile to the donations page, and in live view the email field has jumped up to the contributions section and become a required field, while the profile has the required First Name field as well.
I attach a screengrab of how that looks.
My membership page also has the email field up with the membership drop-down options, and not with the profile. Since I want it on the membership form as a required field that’s not so bad, but it still looks wrong.
It seems therefore that what’s happening has to do with the radio buttons/drop-down menu for the contribution amounts, and not with the profiles, or any default need to have at least one required contact field. Yet I can’t find anywhere on the system to turn off this inclusion of an email field in with the contributions.
So I’m at a loss!
(NB I have indeed checked that the email receipt box is unticked for the donations page).
Any ideas?
Cheers
JAL

Thank you for your authoritative answer! I'm completely new to this, so I'm just finding my way around while setting up the new project.
There's no reason of course why you should want an anonymous donation to have anything to do with a contact management system; I just wanted to remove the email requirement because we'll be running a 'give a fiver' campaign and we don't want to put off people who would make an impulsive gift but wouldn't fill in a form registering that they've done so. We'll have a paypal donate button for them.
However, may I just use this space to mention that nowhere in the documentation does it say what you've just told me. I think it would be helpful just to have a line saying that all contribution pages will have, under their contribution options, a required email field, and that you can't move this field lower down in your added profile, or delete it. Just having that mentioned in the online/ebook documentation would have saved me quite a bit of fruitless work!
Thanks
JAL

I know I'm REALLY late to the party on this, but the thing that would be most helpful (IMO, of course) would a condition that says that:
IF the email field is included in the Profile that is on the Contribution page,
THEN Civi should exclude it from the top of the contribution page,
ELSE inlcude the email at the top of the page.

It looks awkward and confusing up there on its own separated from all the other contact info. Additionally, if you are collecting information about an organization, it's not clear whether or not the email is for the individual contact or the organization.

Thanks Dave. Folks who've been using Civi for a long time (myself included) take for granted that email always appears at the top of the contribution page with the default label "Email Address *" ... above any profiles... regardless of if email field is included in a profile or not. 

For new people, they are very confused by this behavior.

I think it's OK that Email Address is REQUIRED, it's more of a placement and label issue IMHO.

Filed as: https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15067