E-mail at registration problem

Hi,
The problem I have seems to an old issue: How can I get rid of the duplicate e-mail at registration?

The platform I am developing has different types of members and one of the types of members will not even have an e-mail address. These members must reside in the central database as we communicate to them via sms's and in some cases e-mails to a central management body or co-ordinator. These co-ordinators will in some cases do the registrations for the members. I have tried a couple of methods which all are extremely messy and non productive, like to use fake e-mail addresses like XMB234754897@domain.com which use the membership number and some fake "@" address. These work but again causes problems when you send out mass e-mails to the database.

The ideal solution would be something like switching of the central Joomla e-mail at registration function and have fields or switches that would activate and allow for e-mail activation and registration to specific groups of members.

Any idea as to how, what or where I can get closer to solving this major problem will be greatly appreciated. I never thought at design time of this specific platform that this would be a issue at all. MAN, WAS I MISCALCULATING THIS PROBLEM!

Thank you so much in advance!

Otto von Kloëg
South Africa

Duplicate email happens on J1.7 when creating users on backend. It will not affect frontend. This is a problem within J1.7 it self where their Joomla user plugin sends the email, but has no way of disabling it. To my knowledge it's still the case and there's no workaround other then not sending any email at all (either by supplying fake email, save, edit, supply real email or disabling emails globally).

Thank you for the reply,

I did some further investigation regarding the e-mail problem and it seems that there is a lot of discussion regarding this problem. A thread for this is : forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=167296

They mention a crack in the code which I applied and it seems to work OK!

I am of course not sure as yet what the implications would be to the rest of the Registration Workflow but I will have to test it as we go.

I have about 1.2 million people that will need to be registered on the system within the next six months and we thus have to start as soos as possible to get the web running and have people register.

Do you by any chance know about any bulk upload software that will be able to load members into the database?

Here is the code that was commented out in the file libraries/joomla/database/table/user.php

The code in Joomla 1.7 is on line 225 and is commented out as such:
(this is the code to check if the e-mail is already in the database)

//* if ($xid && $xid != intval($this->id)) {
// $this->setError(JText::_('JLIB_DATABASE_ERROR_EMAIL_INUSE'));
// return false;
// }

The code for checking if a e-mail is entered in the e-mail field is in the same file as above and starts on line 192:
(this will allow you to leave the e-mail field blank. Also commented out)

//*if ((trim($this->email) == "") || ! JMailHelper::isEmailAddress($this->email)) {
//* $this->setError(JText::_('JLIB_DATABASE_ERROR_VALID_MAIL'));
//* return false;
//*}

The other thing to make sure of, of course, is that the Required tic in the Field Manager of CB should be marked as NOT REQUIRED otherwise one still get's the problem that it still asks for a e-mail to be entered.

I would also like to know if it is possible to change or to remove some of the pre-defined fields in like the name, firstname, middle name and last name fields?

Thank you again ad have a great day!

Not sure that this old hack will work.

Did you try the username recover reminder functionality where 2 users share the same email address and one of them forgot his/her username?

Hacks are quick changes that almost never think of the complete picture or situation.

Nick,

Not sure what you mean by the "did you try the username recover reminder functionality where 2 users share the same email address and one of them forgot his/her username?" What must I do with this?

For sure that hacks is not the answer and could mess up things on lots of other places but then again if your back is against the wall and with something that should not have been a problem at all, what do you do?

Is there any other possible solutions that you could reccommend?

Regards,

Otto

otto@reveal.co.za wrote: Not sure what you mean by the "did you try the username recover reminder functionality where 2 users share the same email address and one of them forgot his/her username?" What must I do with this?

What I mean is what happens is user1 and user2 are using the same email address and one of them forgets his username. Joomla has a function that will send a username reminder message if user provides their email address. If 2 usernames are using the same email address, how will this function react?

Does it fail?
Does it send whatever it finds first?

Is there any other possible solutions that you could recommend?

I wish I could, but I cannot.

I am just pointing out issues that most likely lead to the unique email address requirement to begin with.