Of course we all need to focus first on meeting the needs and desires of our customers, ie. "members". My organization includes a significant number of "seasoned citizens" who have finally become comfortable with visiting websites. But for whatever reasons they have no desire whatsoever to set up or use an e-mail account. Like others who have posted here, we also have family-based memberships that cover several individuals who prefer to use the same e-mail address.

I'm a little surprised by the comments about the importance of using an e-mail address instead of a username created by each member. I personally have access to more than 200 password-protected websites. My e-mail address is my username in only about 25% of those. In other words 75% of those sites are set up to allow me to create my own username.

Don't get me wrong, the fake e-mail address workaround isn't that difficult to use. But when members are used to being able to access other websites with something other than an e-mail address, it detracts somewhat from all of the other major benefits they get from our organization using Wild Apricot.

So yes ... add my vote to someday making it possible to login with either an e-mail address or a member defined username. And at least for our members, the sooner the better.

 

We are providing a web site for our cub parents and scouts and scout parents and we find we have say 2 parents and their 2 children as 4 members, but the parents and children share a family address, the younger children do not have their own address nor do mothers or fathers want the children to have gmail addresses or things like that, so allowing multiple members with one email address would be an improvement for us. A username and password of their choosing preferable to one WA generate.

The situation also arrises where parents would like email to go to both the family email address and their personal email address, so our users are saying, our family need the ability to have multiple members with the same email address and individual members need to have multiple email addresses. 

Messy but that is our real world. Less messy than multiple membership records for one real person and fake email addresses.

Thanks for commenting. This thread is focused on removing the requirement for email. Having multiple email addresses is a very different thing so I would suggest creating a separate thread so that it can get the attention it deserves.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot