Current behavior:
Each member record is required to have a unique email. Email is as a unique record identifier, for example to login and used for event registrations to determine applicable price.

Desired behavior:
Some organizations have members who do not have/use emails.  So it is desirable that email field should not be mandatory.

Workaround:
Using a 'fake' email address for such records, e.g. John.Smith@noemail.none and setting the option not to send any emails to this member.

Notes:
Our current thinking is to make MemberID field to be the main unique identifier. Ideally we should do it so that people can login with either email or MemberID (for backward compatibility).

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I hope to be uploading my database before too long . . . It sounds like I should be importing the user ids from my current site, even though I don't remember seeing them as a field when I customized my database.

Purpose of course would be to make the transition seamless to them, especially if you are going to switch to using these ids as the main identifier . . .

Am I reading this correctly?

Hello!

Not exactly - of course you may skip IDs on importing into Wild Apricot. In this case it will use emails as it does now.

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Vassily, Wild Apricot team

The current system's user id's are alpha-numeric . . . will that fit into WA's member id field?  For example, my id on our current system is "gypse".  Can I upload those to member id or will that field be strictly numeric? (I don't know why, but I had the impression it was a numeric field . . . )

You are right - current WA MemberID is a numeric field and its value managed by WA system only.

We will consider alphanumeric and ability to modify it.

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Vassily, Wild Apricot team

If the numeric stayed as a "hidden" field for WA's purposes and the user id was public, it would be better for people using the user id to sign in.  It is a lot easier to use your standard user id than to remember a new number - especially when it has no significance to you.  (and less typing for an id as opposed to an email - plus email changes more frequently as providers merge, etc)

Having the user id be unique within the system is good.

Having it be modifiable - nice, but not necessary . . . It would get used by people that used a name that they then changed via marriage, etc - but my experience on my current site and the associated public forum is that I've only had 2 people in 5 years that asked to change their ids.  It could not be done on the system - had to delete one and create a new one . . . so it would be nice to be modified, but not a high priority.

It only makes sense that if you are going to join a group's online presence you are also going to have an email address. Also, how likely is it that people will remember their Wild Apricot ID? I think this is a solution looking for a problem.

We need a solution the replaces email acting as the USERNAME.  We need people to choose their unique username.  The WA member ID is not a good solution, because people will not be able to remember it.   

Email address and fake email address is not working for us.   Fully 1/3 of our members share an email address with usually with one, but sometime more than one, other person.  Husband and wife is the most common example. 

It is not so much a problem for notifications.  The wife just reads the husband's notice.  But, how to explain to someone that, for updating your profile, or registering for an event, your USERNAME is fake in front of your email address.  How can we hope to move to automated membership management with this issue.   

A unique user name is also the solution for members who do not have email.  

Please please consider this fundamental issue.

Thanks.

GEM 

   

Mike Gunn:

It only makes sense that if you are going to join a group's online presence you are also going to have an email address. Also, how likely is it that people will remember their Wild Apricot ID? I think this is a solution looking for a problem.

Two things:  Yes, they could have an email address, but it could be shared. (as my husband and I do).  We have this situation in about 1/3 of our members.  That means one of us has the word fake placed in front of our email address and signon for that person to update the profile, or renew, or register for events is difficult.  Who will remember that in this one case my signon is my email address with the word fake in front of it?  And what happens if there are 3 people who use it (we have that situation).  Is it fake for the second person and fake fake for the third person?  And this does not work for online new members.  The second person goes to join and finds they can't becasue the email is "used".  Even if we told them about "fake", we'd also have to tell them to go the subscriptions and turn emails off.  This won't work.  .    

The second thing is that we want to use WA for all our members, not just those involed with joining our group's online presence.

I agree that the WA ID is a poor idea.  The solution is that each person choose a USERNAME.  Then WA would ensure that it was unique before it is processed.  Lots of web sites do that. 

We can but hope.

GEM 

I appreciate the details and your point about username makes good sense to me. I passed this on to a few colleagues and we will definitely consider this as we are planning our further work in this area.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

E-mail addresses turn out to be unique because e-mail systems require them to be that way.  So by making that the login one gets a unique user name without requiring the system to do any checking.  I might add that no administrator (as in me) has to monitor and manage the database to make sure that no duplicate logins occur.

Most of the places I log-in or register these days seem to be asking for the e-mail address as the userID.  It is pretty standard.  (And remember folks, you can get an email address from your members and they can promplty turn off all the emails if they don't want to hear from you.)

I don't see the point of providing an alternative such as the MemberID.  All of the features of Wild Apricot revolve around using e-mail.

We are creating dummy e-mail addresses for old member records, however, we are Archiving those records.  (One of the problems I've encountered is that my formula for creating dummy e-mails created duplicates among our database which I only discovered during the upload process.)  If the member comes along with new information and an e-mail address we reactivate the record and put in the email address.

We plan to look at records with bad contact information and reach out to members asking them to provide new information, including e-mail addresses.

For members who have no e-mail address, we are contemplating teaching them how to create e-mail addresses with any of the many free services so common today.

This day and age it seems a disservice to members to enable them to have no e-mail address.  And it may be a disservice to allow them not participate in change.  I am trying to take a stance that Wild Apricot is new and we need to take advantage of these new changes. . . . Rather than saying, well you are right, we have done things this same way for 15 years and we should let our members keep doing them the same old way . . . Even though we are implementing Wild Apricot to move away from some of the constraints from those old systems.

 

 

 

 

I really appreciate your perspective.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I also would prefer the user name as the unique identifier.  Absolute least favorite is the member ID number.

I like your existing logic and see no reason to change it.  Not sure why this is really an issue.  If someone doesn't have an e-mail address, then why would they be logging into WA anyway?  If they are on the web, then they will have an e-mail account.  Doesn't seem to make sense.

Has there been any thought of being able to use a user name instead of a email address for your unique indentifier? I have two groups that most likely would use Wild Apricot if this was available. Both these groups are youth groups where a parent has more than one child. The parent is not going to have a separate email address for each child.

Using "Plussed Email" won't solve it because not all email providers allow the use of it.

joined your comment to existing thread

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Feedback collected so far is pretty diverse and we have not yet figured out the final solution yet to keep everyone happy.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We also have maybe 20% of our members that don't have email, and are using the phony email work around.  I don't think the member ID is a good alternate since it's so hard to remember (although it is unique which is good).  I agree with one comment --- anyone who is logging in has computer knowledge and should have an email.  The ones we enter manually with phony addresses generally don't have computers, so a unique login other than email for them won't do anything for them. We want them to get on board with email to make the communication easier for us.  (the non-email we have to contact separtely, and actually will end up having less communication from us as a result).

For couples that share emails, we are working with them to encourage them to get a free email (like gmail) that they can set up to forward to their common email address.  I think their objection to getting a 2nd email is they don't want to be bothered managing a separate mailbox.  If they forward all messages, then the gmail address simply becomes their unique user login id for our site, and they can then register for on line events with it.  

Having a back up way to enable them to create a login without email is not a bad idea, but let's not do away with the email as the primary login.

Agree with skipat on this. We have about 40% without email or computers and have created their WA accounts using dummy addresses - but this is far from ideal.

I do think WA should continue to use email address as the main login method, as other posters have said, it is by necessity unique. From the backoffice management side we just need a way of entering member details without the email address being mandatory from the WA system point of view.

Can you treat the Member ID as "mandatory" and still have login using email?

As others have observed, members without computers or email addresses aren't going to need to login anyway!

That's the solution we want to implement - using memberID as alternative login identifier and making email non-mandatory. But this requires quite a bit of change in the underlying foundation.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Perfect. Perhaps in conjuction with the security

Perfect. Perhaps in conjuction with the security /

Perfect. Perhaps in conjuction with the security / group

Perfect. Perhaps in conjuction with the security / group model ;-)

 

I have multiple users with a single e-mail adress who control more than one membership record on my site and some who control dozens.  One of my solutions allows a user with one e-mail address to control an unlimited number of accounts with minimial configuration on the part of the system administrator.  I can also easily handle members with no e-mail access at all.

Like many other WA users we have one company that providers webservers (WA of course) and another that provide the e-mail server.

We use our basic solution for users who need control of a second membership record.  In the basic solution we configure a e-mail address for the user on our e-mail server which simply forwards all e-mail to their actual e-mail address.  The user then opens his/her second membership using the e-mail address that we created for him/her.  We configure all our system-generated e-mails to specify the registered e-mail address within the body of the e-mail.  The user now receives two sets of system-generated e-mails to his one e-mail address.  Each e-mail identifies the appropriate registered e-mail address so the user always knows to which membership the e-mail applies.

Our advanced solution works for an unlimited number of membership records with minimal configuration.  We create a subdomain of our registered url, and then create a single e-mail acccount on that subdomain which, as before, simply forwards any e-mail to the users single e-mail address.  The e-mail address that we create for the user takes the form "*@{user's subdomain},{our domain}".  The effect of this is that any e-mail sent to any e-mail address on the subdomain is forwarded to our client's single e-mail address.  The client then has an unlimited number of e-mail addreses available that he/she can use to create new membership records.  They have complete freedom (within the limits of a valid e-mail address) to create names for accounts that mean something to them which could, for example, be their company's branch names or their own internal reference numbers.  As before every system e-mail that we generate specifies the e-mail address for that membership record so the user always knows to which of their many potential memberships it refers.

If I need to create a membership record for a user who genuinely has no e-mail address at all (and probably doesn't have internet access at all) but I simply want to create a record for the member so that all my membership records are in one place then I adopt a similar approach with an e-mail address on subdomain ("nomail" i.e. *@nomail.{my domain}). In this case I have an autoresponder that says something along the lines of "Sorry but this member has no e-mail access please make contact by telephone or letter."  I can now create as many accounts as I like making up an e-mail address on the spur of the moment in the form "{whatever seems good at the time}@nomail.{my domain}".  Anyone who tries to contact of these members by e-mail receives my apologies note, and the format of the e-mail address immediately indicates to admin personnel that the member has no e-mail.  Simples!