Allow administrators to add contacts without email [2328]

• 02-05-2010, 2:07 PM

  16667 in reply to 6795

  bernieperry Joined about 2 years ago Posts 9

  Re: Allow members without email [2328] 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.

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• 05-27-2010, 3:14 AM

  18399 in reply to 16667

  Kyle Joined about 2 years ago Vancouver Posts 42

  Re: Allow members without email [2328] Dmitry, as per your post back in November I would like to see some progress towards making email a non-mandatory field (with the transparent workaround of having MemberiD as the unique record identifier). For our organization we simply do not want to have the hassle of maintaining a spreadsheet of fake email addresses that constantly needs to be reviewed and updated every time a new member/donor joins that doesn't have an email address. PLUS, this would decrease the amount of emails Wild Apricot would need to send out by a decent number I'm sure.  For example, even when I unsubscribe my dummy addresses from Event Reminders/Manually Sent Emails, Wild Apricot still sends out membership reminders/renewals to them. They invariably bounce and Wild Apricot then sends out another email notifying me of the bounce. So it would benefit you as much as would provide a better service to us clients.  Kyle Mitchell | www.spec.bc.ca

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• 05-27-2010, 8:33 AM

  18400 in reply to 18399

  Chief_Apricot Joined about 5 years ago Toronto Posts 4,265

  Re: Allow members without email [2328] Kyle, It is quite clear that this is needed and important change. So there is no question IF we do this, the only question is WHEN.  We are now analyzing if we can put this into version 3.6.  Dummy emails is a crude workaround which has many limitations. However this particular problem you mention can be addressed - you need to change the overall email preference for these contact records ('E-mail enabled', see http://help.wildapricot.com/display/DOC/Edit+email+subscriptions+for+a+contact ) Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot

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• 08-22-2010, 5:08 AM

  19343 in reply to 18400

  Dawn Joined about 2 years ago Posts 21

  Re: Allow members without email [2328] It seems that WA is still working on this one.  I would like to throw my vote in to please change the login method.  Like previous posts, my organization has a little more than 6000 members at the moment.  Of these members, we had to set 2000 of them to dummy emails because of families that use the same email address for multiple members. Most sites don't require the email address to be the login.  Most just require a username of some sort, you can enter your email address as the uid if you want. The problem also arises that people change their email address, when they get sick of aol, yahoo, hotmail and want to switch to gmail or something.  Or what if a person signed up with a cable company, and that company gets bought out, or they decide to switch providers?  Then the uid has to get changed.  I say, username should be just that, username.  Easiest work around might be to default it to email address, since most have it, but have the back up be alphanumeric.

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• 01-14-2011, 1:31 PM

  21147 in reply to 6795

  Chief_Apricot Joined about 5 years ago Toronto Posts 4,265	Re: Allow administrators to add contacts without email [2328] We are now allowing to store records without email.  Dmitry Buterin, Chief Apricot
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