zia_narratora Posted October 21, 2005 Posted October 21, 2005 I just upgraded my message board from 1.x to 2.1 and am incredibly disappointed to find that my users can no longer have multiple accounts with the same email address. I would really like to see this feature available again in future versions as right now I am seriously looking at moving to an entirely different board software because this feature is necessary to my message board users.
Antony Posted October 22, 2005 Posted October 22, 2005 I know this used to be a setting in 1.3, and I assume it still is, although I can't find it at the moment.
zia_narratora Posted October 23, 2005 Posted October 23, 2005 Nope, I've already been informed that it isn't available anymore because of the way the database has been restructured. I've been told that I need to tell my users to put in fake email addresses, which doesn't work because then I have no way to contact them. I know a possible workaround, but I'm not capable of coding it on my own as I'm a graphic designer and not a programmer. Theoretically, someone could make a custom profile field for email address, include it in the registration information, and then re-tool the post office to use the information from that custom field rather than the primary email address field.
Dark Phantom Posted October 23, 2005 Posted October 23, 2005 Why do people need multiple usernames... With all the free email sevices, why can't they just get another email.
zia_narratora Posted October 23, 2005 Posted October 23, 2005 Because I don't want them to have multiple email addresses. I run a roleplaying game. People need multiple usernames so that they can maintain accounts for each character they play-- I play something like sixty characters, and each of them needs their own account so they can each have a full profile with identifying information. I would like to be able to send my users emails and make sure that they get all their emails and alerts. I would also like to have a current database of which users are playing which characters-- it's easiest to just do a search by email to see that the characters are registered to the same user. That is why I want multiple user names that all go to the same email address.
Management Lindy Posted October 24, 2005 Management Posted October 24, 2005 Hello, The IPS kernel is structured to allow sharing of member information between our products and your own systems. This information is linked together by e-mail address and is required to be unique, so unfortunately, what you are wanting to do is not possible without modification and I don't believe there are any plans to change that - I do apologize.
nicoo Posted October 24, 2005 Posted October 24, 2005 If your users use gmail there is a possibility. If you have the adress sunny@gmail.com than you can also use sunny+something@gmail.com or sunny+someotheradress@gmail.com or sunny+whateveryouwant@gmail.com or ... So you will receive email from all those adresses !! You can even filter these adresses in its own labels, and that makes you have like multiple adresses with one account ! Thats gmail-power !
Guardian2 Posted October 24, 2005 Posted October 24, 2005 What's to stop one from using a fake address, then going into the database and changing it back to the real one?
Dark Phantom Posted October 24, 2005 Posted October 24, 2005 I wouldn't be shocked if your users used fake emails already.
zia_narratora Posted October 24, 2005 Posted October 24, 2005 Using fake emails makes it sort of impossible to stay on top of things, so people don't do it. It's not as if people aren't allowed to have multiple accounts-- we need them to! That's the problem. It's only when you don't want people using multiple accounts that they do things like fake. Guardian-- the problem is that it won't allow duplicate entries in the tables, not just on the registration page. Thanks, Nicoo, but I can't ask every single one of our users to change their email service just for the purposes of this site. It's useful to know, though. Lindy, I appreciate your response. I'm wondering why such a decision was made-- I'm frankly shocked if I'm the first person to complain about this. It's an absolutely necessary feature for my site and the past week without it has been an absolute nightmare because we can't contact any of our users. I really, really like the software besides this problem, and I'm trying to figure out a workaround for it, but I'm not a programmer and I don't even know where to start.
Dave Baker Posted November 15, 2005 Posted November 15, 2005 Lindy, I appreciate your response. I'm wondering why such a decision was made-- I'm frankly shocked if I'm the first person to complain about this. Count me as the second! :( Many of my users like to have an "anonymous" user name (e.g., taxtalker) when they give advice to others, because they're lawyers and accountants and don't want to get sued. But they also like to have a "real" user name (e.g., Dave Baker) when they're providing information other than advice. The worst part about this change, to me, is that now I have several hundred users whose email addresses in the system have been changed to "1234-user@wherever.com" where "1234-" is the user's member number. The conversion script apparently picked one or the customer's two user names to apply this change to, so there wouldn't be duplicate email addresses in the database. (I'm not sure what has happened in the case of customers with three or more user names that had used the same email address.) But the users don't know which of their user names has the good email address and which one has the bogus one, so I have to get in the loop to do a search as the administrator in order to straighten it out. Plus, I'm not sure how I straighten it out ... if I go ahead and delete the user name with the bogus email account, that means I need to advise the customer to use the other user name in the future, and I might have deleted the user name the customer prefers. Seems like there should have been some ability to merge posts into a single user name so that there wouldn't be so many messages on the board from soon-to-be-deleted user names.
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