Suggestion: 

What about an audit log dedicated to profile changes.  A summary of this log could be put on the dashboard showing how many profiles have been changed in last 7 days, last 30 days, etc/  You click on the count you want to review and get a report which shows which member names have been changed, then you drill down on that name and you see what field(s) where changed.  The report would need to show what it was before the change and what it is now showing the changed item(s) in BOLD or in COLOR

Your ideas are quite good. The biggest challenge is all the overhead to track and store details for every field changed. Essentially, we would need to double or triple volume of information stored for members.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We would vote for this... here's one way you could do it.

 Add a hidden system true/false field to each record called "changed" that is true if the record has been changed.  Every time a member edits their profile, you load the profile into a temporary array, and when they exit/save the system compares the temporary array to the new record.  If there's a discrepancy you set the changed field to true... otherwise it just gets it's old value.

 Then once a day mail the admins of any records that have changed, and then reset all of the changed fields to false for the next day.

You don't have to duplicate records that way, right? 

Kevin, thanks for the suggestions. There are many ways to deal with this issue - in any case there is a substantial effort needed to develop this properly, including all the reporting, notifications, edge cases, performance issues etc. So no question that we will resolve this - just a question of prioritizing against all other requests in the roadmap and wishlist.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I agree that this would be a great addition to the software.  The fact that Site Admins don't get to choose whether users can change fields in their profile or not is unfortunate.  At least this would allow us to be aware of changes so that we can take the appropriate actions.

@wchester -I would appreciate more details, e.g:

1) What is the situation when you do not want users to change fields

2) For every field in member profile you can set whether members can edit it in profile, have you considered using this?

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

Setting the fields is an acceptable solution- however the concern for notification is 

1 All our members have the same password to start so someone may change the wrong member (by mistake or intentionally) 

2 Being notified of changes would allows us to update other data bases

3 Objectionable info could be deleted before posting

thanks. 

I would love to see this function added as well! 

Haven't seen any movement on this for a few months.  Any plans to add this feature soon in upcoming releases?

Thanks!

This is part of our 2010 roadmap but it has not been scheduled to a particular release yet.

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We have been looking into this for a while and trying to come up for a solution to this. We've decided to consider the ability to log when changes are made to a contact record, and by who. This will basically provide an audit trail for a contact record that you can look at to see what what changed, when, and by who.

I'm going to post the analysis of the solution that we have done so far.   It's fairly high level, so it's more an overview of how it would work in the system and what changes would be made and a few places where we talk about how the system works, but it should be very familiar to anyone who has worked with Wild Apricot.

I'd love to get your feedback on this: What do you think of the solution? What would you change? What would you add or take away? Is there anything in it that does not make sense to you?

Thanks!

 Overview

• Stop using Notes fields and write all important contact changes into the new read-only contact audit journal (change log will include (at least) Date, description of change and what and/or who made the change)
• Display changes audit journal on the contact card, including overview of recent changes
• Expand all members summaries with recent update information so that the administrator can easily overview not only recent applications, renewals and updates, but changes to existing records as well
• Add new system fields to show latest contact field changes. These fields will be used in advanced search
  

Remove logging from Notes field
Currently: The internal use Notes field is used by the system to log some of the changes made to a contact.

• The automatic updating of the Notes field would end.This will then be editable only by the administrator (not the system)
  
• All system changes to a contact will go to the new contact changes audit journal.
  

Audit of changes to Contact
There can be many kinds of contact details changes and they can be made by different kinds of users (i.e. administrator or member) or even automatically (e.g. when payment confirmation has been received). To order the changes, they are divided into different categories:

• By Source (who or what initiated the change)
• By Action (what the particular kind of change occurred)
  

Format of record entry detailing theChange

• Each change causes a new change record to be added in the contact's Changes audit journal
• Records are listed by date (descending, most recent changes first)

Source of changes

• Changes made by the member or admin will be labeled so that you can see who made the change.
• Changes made by the system will have a reference to the action that made the change. (like a payment being processed and changing a member to "active")
  

Search fields for recent updates

• Add to the search the ability search on changed records based on the following criteria:
  
  Profile fields last changed - Show date when contact profile fields (including membership form fields as they are combined now) were last updated.
  
  Membership details last changed - Date when contact membership (level, status or renewal date) was changed (any reason - import, renewal, etc.). When membership is enabled or restored, this date is also updated.
  
  Profile or Membership last changed - Combination of two above - this field is used in the  Members Summary table
  
  Contact last action -    Show latest date of changes audit journal
  

Agree!  It's more overwhelming to be out of the loop!

I don't think changes need to be stored for reference.  I just need an email telling me it happened so we can update all corresponding info on our end.

Agree that this is needed too.

We need this too for our sponsors accounts.  the privacy settings don't allow us to control what information is seen and we charge them on this basis.  For example, some sponsors pay to have only their logo on the sponsor page, some pay more to include contact info, and some want a write up.  We can't stop them from editing their privacy settings which is a huge issue.

We don't want an audit trail.  We want to be notified by email when ANY changes are made.  That's it.  Even if it's just an email that says "member made changes to account" would be a huge improvement over what we have now which is nothing.

I agree, just a "member X has changed profile" message to the admin would be a great help.

I think it makes sense long term to create an audit trail of the contact/member record before and after as well as the date and by whom it was changed, and then allow the administrator to select by date and membership level an extract to excel.

 

Definitely for the short term if it helps deliver this sooner, an email regarding the change to the administrator would be HUGE. 

I would love to see a notification to administrator so we would know it was time to do a new download.

But do you want to get this notification for every member update? It does not sound feasible that you would download it for each occasion. Please comment. 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

I agree Chief.  It is not feasible to download EVERY time a change is made.  That is the reason I would like to be informed that a change was made so that I could decide when I see what the change was whether to download or not to download.  Sorry, I don't really think I'm Hamlet.

Unfortunately the WA database is not as robust as we need and therefore we keep all our data stored in a FileMaker Pro file.  We'd like for WA to be thee "go to file" that all Board Members have access to for the most correct and up to date info.---BUT---we would need to know when to download the personal information into Filemaker.  I'm not sure yet what the frequency might be because we are just starting with WA.

An example of when we might do a download would be when we were ready to print name badges or address labels.

Your company is the greatest.  I really think this is awesome that you ask our opinions and honestly care what our needs are.  I guess it's just good marketing strategy--but unfortunately not all companies care like yours does.  THANKS!

Our clients typically have at least a few hundred records (or thousands) so logging which fields changed on which records and then emailing the administrator looks like a pretty complicated task, sorry, we do not think we can tackle it yet.  So we have decided initially simply log the fact for each record when it was changed by member and when it was changed by admin (but not track what fields were changed and old/new values - too much overhead). 

Thanks for your kind words.

I would appreciate additional insight from you - what would we need to add/change in Wild Apricot for you guys to stop using File Maker altogether. Please email me: db AT wildapricot dot com 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

We currently have around 600 members/contacts in our organisation and from our experience over that last 6 or so months our WA system has been in use, members do not update their profiles very often.
So as mentioned before a simple "member XXX has updated their profile" message or maybe better than that, a "member activity" section under the member tab that lists the member profile activity for the last day, week, month..... would cover what most of us need.

The important thing is to provide us with a clue as to what and how much is changing so we can decide when to download a new spreadsheet to update up address labels or whatever we need it for.

 

This is a critical thing for our group.

we need to know, because of external lists that need to be maintained.

Another comment received:

 

"...I REALLY need to know when our members go on the website and update their profiles. You need to have an email alert system, so that I would receive an email when a member updates their contact information. Right now, I have no clue when someone updates their address, for example, and it is leading to some problems. The member assumes when they update online, that our internal system will also get updated, and it's not because I have no idea when they update online. I would be happy with a simple email stating that Mr. so and so updated his profile. I can then go online and see what changes he made...." 

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Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot