Print PDF-Letters available for deceased contacts - Design Decision?

[Fabian_SYSTOPIA]

Hello,

I recently noticed that the option "Print PDF-Letter" is available for contacts marked as deceased. Also, PDF-Letters will be generated for those contacts if their are included in a search result an you choose "Print PDF Letter for Contacts".

In my oppinion this should not be the case as you risk writing letters to dead people. However this may make sense in other use cases that I don't know of so I do have the following questions:

• Is the situation described above a design decision/intended behaviour?
• If yes: Do you have any suggestions how to deactivate that function on an installation?
• If no: Should I post a bug report?

Regards
Fabian

[Donald Lobo]

since deceased is a search option, i suspect we should drive it from there. i.e. ensure that is checked/un-checked based on what u want to do.

seems like there might be a good case to promote that option from demographics to the top pane (i.e. close to 'Search in Trash')

lobo

[Fabian_SYSTOPIA]

Dear Lobo,

thanks for the fast answer.

I agree, that promoting the search option "deceased" to a more obvious location and setting "no" as the default would be a good measure. In fact there are many cases in which I would exclude deceased contacts from querys (e.g. basic search, advanced search, most reports....) by default.

However, I am still not sure if there is any case in which it makes sense to send a pdf-letter to a deceased contact?! In my oppinion this function (or any other kind of interaction) should not be available as the risk of accidentally writing to a deceased contact is too high. This is probably also the reason why deceased contacts cannot be contacted via E-Mail (no matter what their communication preferences are).

Would you (and/or other people) agree on that?

Regards
Fabian

[Detlev]

As you export contacts, you are asked whether to

"Exclude contacts with "do not mail" privacy, no street address, or who are deceased. "

I would propose, that CiviCRM should behave similar for exporting, printing pdf's, and printing address labels, as well as for mailings and bulk emails!

Such like:

Exclude contacts:
[ X ] with "do not mail" privacy
[ X ] with no street address
[ X ] who are deceased.

(with all of them checked by default)

Would be nice for 4.5, wouldn't it?

Cheers, Detlev

[Donald Lobo]

detlev:

any chance u can get antrik to work on this for 4.5, please?

lobo

[Fabian_SYSTOPIA]

Hi guys,

in addition, I noticed that also for contacts who have the privacy option "do not mail" it is possible to print out a pdf letter! This should also be addressed in future changes.

Imho this is even more serious than being able to generate pdf-letters for contacts marked as deceased. No user would expect that the system will print a letter for a contact who is clearly marked as "do not mail".

Does anybody know a workaround? Except for explicitely excluding them in the search criteria?

[antrik]

Do we ever want to send letters to deceased contacts? Hard to say. Some kinds of privileges/obligations automatically pass on to the heirs -- but if we already *know* a contact is deceased, that most likely either means that we have been contacted by the heirs already; or that a previous letter has been returned... So it's really hard to think of a case. OTOH experience tells us that whenever software tries to be smart and forbid something because a developer couldn't think of a use case, sooner or later someone else *will* find a use case, and will be very dismayed... Some kind of warning/confirmation seems a safer choice than disabling the functionality entirely.

As for changing the default for searches and reports in general, that's actually not so clear-cut. (See also http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,29799.0.html ) While I can think of many cases where it's obviously preferable to exclude deceased contacts, I can also think of various cases where they should be included, and not doing so would yield very confusing results. (Such as donation reports, past memberships, event attendance reports etc.) Thus my vote is against changing the default.

Making the search option more visible would certainly be very nice to have -- but I don't see myself working on this in the foreseeable future: we have way more urgent things on our plate :-(

[johns]

Personally I don't want too much magic being done by such flags. We mark Do Not Mail for contacts who don't want mail, then we make sure our mailing group excludes them. That seems appropriate to me. I can see organizations using that generic sounding flag for specific purposes. For example, Do Not Mail can reasonably be used to mean "don't send fundraising letters, but do still send an invitation to the holiday party."