Allowing multiple registrations from same email address causing problems?

[ian]

I've read through several threads on this topic, but none of them are quite like what I'm experiencing.

I created an event and enabled the settings to allow one person to register multiple participants as well as allowing multiple registrations using the same email address. The profile I'm using has first/last name. There is at least one instance in which one person has successfully registered and payed for herself and one other. In this case, separate email addresses were specified for each participant. So I know that's working.

My problem is with a contact record that was overwritten when a second registration went through with the same email address. "Amy" and "Lee" apparently are partners in their own agency and share an email address. At 10:01 this morning Amy registered and payed for the event using "amy_lee@example.com". Three minutes later at 10:04 Lee registered and payed for the event using "amy_lee@example.com". Apparently, Lee's information overwrote Amy's in the contact table, and now Lee appears twice in the participants list and there is no record of Amy. The only reason I know Amy's name is because I configured the confirmation email to be BCC'd to me (also, the PayPal transaction history has two transactions, both with "Amy XXX Lee YYY" in the Name field, which seems odd).

My questions are:

• Am I doing something wrong or is this an issue with the application?
• Can anyone suggest a fix that would keep allowing multiple registrations with the same email address but without the contact info being overwritten?
• What is the best way to fix the data problem with Amy and Lee? Should I create a contact record for Amy using the app, then use SQL to modify the contact_id in civicrm_participant to point to Amy's contact record?

Any help is much appreciated.

Ian

[ian]

BTW, just to be clear, they both have a status of "Registered" and I do have Counted? set to Yes for Registered under Participant Status Options. But it's set to No for "Pending".

I'm wondering if something like the following happened:

• Amy completed info entry and proceeded to PayPal to complete the transaction. Her status would have been Pending.
• Before Amy completed the transaction, Lee entered her info which then overwrote Amy's since she was still Pending.

If this is the case, setting Counted? to True for Pending would prevent it from happening again. The only thing that troubles me about this explanation is the fact that the confirmation emails had the correct names. And the confirmation email only goes out after the participant has been moved to Registered status. So, if, by the time Amy's transaction went through, Lee had overwritten Amy's info in the database, why didn't the first confirmation email pull Lee's name instead of Amy's?

[dharmatech]

Hi Ian. What are you contact matching rules set to? It sounds like the strict individual rule is set to email only. So since you allowed multiple registrations with the same email, when lee registered second, CiviCRM found a match because of the same email address and overrode the data.

If you set your rules to something more strict like first name AND last name AND email (where all three have to match), this wont happen.

Hope that helps
tony

[ian]

Thanks, Tony. I didn't realize the strict dedupe rule was automatically used for event registrants (even though, you know, it says it right there in the help bubble). That little factoid would be a helpful addition to the help bubble next to "Allow multiple registrations from the same email address" on the Online Registration page.

[AkronAA]

Hi Ian. What are you contact matching rules set to? It sounds like the strict individual rule is set to email only. So since you allowed multiple registrations with the same email, when lee registered second, CiviCRM found a match because of the same email address and overrode the data.

If you set your rules to something more strict like first name AND last name AND email (where all three have to match), this wont happen.

Hope that helps
tony

Where exactly do I set this?  I have this same issue.

[ian]

Go to Administer CiviCRM >> Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts and modify Individual set to Strict to include more than email.