CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I set up CiviCRM for a student society in Australia with great success. CiviCRM is a great piece of software - thank you very much to all the developers who make it possible.

This year we have processed many thousand event and membership registrations and I wanted to make a couple of observations that have come out of this experience.

The first I've made a bug report for here (http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5039). CiviEvent allows events to exceed their maximum participant setting if multiple people hit the registration page at similar times. If you have an event that sells quickly I would not suggest using CiviEvent because there is the potential for it sell many more tickets to your event than you might wish it to. We use real time credit card authorisation but this would be even more relevant for organisations that rely on PayPal Website Payments Standard. Read the bug report for further explanation.

The second issue occurs if someone has two windows open in their browser to your website and are registering for two different events at the same time. CiviCRM gets confused and very odd behaviour can result. Often one browser window will switch over to the other event, and we've had cases of payment being debited from the credit card twice but only one registration is recorded in CiviCRM while the correct emails will be sent.

To explain this further: if you go to two seperate events at click one and then the other and keep alternating between windows as you hit continue on each page the two browser windows will end up on the same event registration page. Alternatively, if you go through the registration process for one event and then pause at the page where you confirm your details are correct and open a new page to a different event, once again proceed through registration and stop at the page where you confirm your details. You now have two pages on the last step before payment is taken by the real time gateway (in our case). If you click continue in both windows within a few second of each other then the gateway will take the money from the card for each event. However, the details that CiviCRM goes to save will be related to only the second event that you have filled in the registration details for. Then as CiviCRM is saving that data the de-dupe rules jump in and see that you have two participants who are exactly the same and only saves one participant. What is strange though is I believe the two different registrants still receive an email confirming their registered status and it goes to their separate email addresses.

These issues also occur when making donations on two separate pages at once.

A similar issue also occurs when configuring two or more events at once - what happens here is that the details from one event can completely replace those for another event. This was frustrating the first time it happened! I'm careful to only configure one event at a time now.

This is a pretty consistent issue in CiviCRM, not just an issue related to CiviEvent.

But the above things are manageable and we've handled them ok.

Thanks Team

Hey Desert Rider:

thanx for your kind comments and feedback, much appreciated

with regard to the permissions, for the short term, u can modify:

CRM/Contact/Page/View/UserDashBoard.php

line 140 to fix the permissioning issue. Not sure what the right solution for that issue is currently

With regard to your prior post, both are valid issues which we will need to fix at some point in time. The issues are a bit non-trivial

loboo

lobo