OLX creates multiple separate Participants in Events instead of Guest records

Daniel Noga 2 · August 2016

I've got an open case and am currently waiting for another example of this to come through so I can submit the requested screenshot of this issue, but in the meantime, I wondered if anyone else had run into this issue:

Sometimes, a person will register through our website for an event and will also register some guests, and instead of coming into the Event record as a main Participant with Guest records underneath it, all of the records will come through as separate Participant records. Each one of them will be under the same name, and all of them will be linked to the Constituent, with the result that if we go into the Events tab on the Constituent's record, we'll see that event listed however many times they registered guests for--so if they bring 5 guests, we'll find 6 instances of that event listed on the Events tab.

We can't fix this in Batch prior to committing, because there is absolutely no sign of any guests other than the tipoff of the registration fee (e.g., we know there are guests because it's a $10 event and the gift amount is, say, $50). From within the batch, if we go to Gift > Link > Event and open the pending Participant record, all we will find is a single participant record with no sign of any guest records (presumably because they are being treated as separate Participants). Our only recourse is to note the Registration Fee, keep our eyes peeled for amounts exceeding a single registration, then going into the Event record and manually fixing this all after the Batch has already been committed.

This only happens some of the time and we're not sure why it's behaving so inconsistently, either.

Has anyone else run into this?

Christine Robertson · August 2016

We ran into this as well for an event one of our clients did. We thought it was because the ticket purchaser listed his/her own name multiple times, but we probably should have dug a little farther.

Daniel Noga 2 · August 2016

Christine McMinn:

We ran into this as well for an event one of our clients did. We thought it was because the ticket purchaser listed his/her own name multiple times, but we probably should have dug a little farther.

Thanks, Christine. It looks like that is the case for us as well. The problem with this is that a lot of people will do this when they know they want to bring guests to an event, but they don't know who they'll be bringing. Given the choice, we would register these as Guest records under the main Registrant record, but we don't seem to get that choice. To my way of thinking, it's problematic that multiple records are created with no way for the operator to intervene. In addition, the creation of multiple Participant records all linked to the same Constituent record makes no sense at all, because one person can't be two attendees at the same event; regardless of the number of tickets purchased, John Doe can only come to the same event once and take up a single seat--so any additional registrants must obviously be guests or mistakes.

The conclusion at the end of my case was that this would be passed on to the OLX team to consider approaching differently, but evidently this is functioning as intended.

Christine Robertson · August 2016

If there's something to vote on, I totally agree that this needs to be fixed. We do need a way for people to select "guest" or something like it when they don't know.don't type their guest names into OLX. It took way too much time to clean up the mess that ensued from people typing their own name multiple times.

Michele Stender · August 2016

Christine McMinn:

If there's something to vote on, I totally agree that this needs to be fixed. We do need a way for people to select "guest" or something like it when they don't know.don't type their guest names into OLX. It took way too much time to clean up the mess that ensued from people typing their own name multiple times.

Hi, Both of you may have tried this but have you enabled the ability for your guests to register anonysmouly on your forms? If you enable this on the Field Options tab of your event form:

8ec78c108ab5e042d011328356a53f7b-huge-re

Then it will give your registrants the option to register guest later (example below):

0f4daba5f7f117432adb65707eb2dee6-huge-re

You will also be able to edit these labels on the fine tuning tab if you prefer them to say something other than "provide information when checking in to the event.

I hope this helps!

Daniel Noga 2 · August 2016

Michele Stender:

Christine McMinn:

If there's something to vote on, I totally agree that this needs to be fixed. We do need a way for people to select "guest" or something like it when they don't know.don't type their guest names into OLX. It took way too much time to clean up the mess that ensued from people typing their own name multiple times.

Hi, Both of you may have tried this but have you enabled the ability for your guests to register anonysmouly on your forms? If you enable this on the Field Options tab of your event form:

Then it will give your registrants the option to register guest later (example below):

You will also be able to edit these labels on the fine tuning tab if you prefer them to say something other than "provide information when checking in to the event.

I hope this helps!

Thanks Michele! This turns out to be the perfect solution for us, because the Guest records then come into the Event record just the way we would like them to. I'm going to implement this and see if it helps us with our situation. The only catch I can see (which has nothing to do with BB and everything to do with human nature) is that our more regular attendees who are used to adding their name repeatedly may continue doing so. I am considering bolding the text that reads "Register later (The guest can provide this information when checking in to the event)" so as to make it stand out.

Michele Stender · August 2016

Daniel Noga:

Michele Stender:

Christine McMinn:

If there's something to vote on, I totally agree that this needs to be fixed. We do need a way for people to select "guest" or something like it when they don't know.don't type their guest names into OLX. It took way too much time to clean up the mess that ensued from people typing their own name multiple times.

Hi, Both of you may have tried this but have you enabled the ability for your guests to register anonysmouly on your forms? If you enable this on the Field Options tab of your event form:

Then it will give your registrants the option to register guest later (example below):

You will also be able to edit these labels on the fine tuning tab if you prefer them to say something other than "provide information when checking in to the event.

I hope this helps!

Thanks Michele! This turns out to be the perfect solution for us, because the Guest records then come into the Event record just the way we would like them to. I'm going to implement this and see if it helps us with our situation. The only catch I can see (which has nothing to do with BB and everything to do with human nature) is that our more regular attendees who are used to adding their name repeatedly may continue doing so. I am considering bolding the text that reads "Register later (The guest can provide this information when checking in to the event)" so as to make it stand out.

Awesome. AND good idea to bold

Stephen Robertshaw · September 2016

Michele Stender:

Daniel Noga:

Michele Stender:

Christine McMinn:

If there's something to vote on, I totally agree that this needs to be fixed. We do need a way for people to select "guest" or something like it when they don't know.don't type their guest names into OLX. It took way too much time to clean up the mess that ensued from people typing their own name multiple times.

Hi, Both of you may have tried this but have you enabled the ability for your guests to register anonysmouly on your forms? If you enable this on the Field Options tab of your event form:

Then it will give your registrants the option to register guest later (example below):

You will also be able to edit these labels on the fine tuning tab if you prefer them to say something other than "provide information when checking in to the event.

I hope this helps!

Thanks Michele! This turns out to be the perfect solution for us, because the Guest records then come into the Event record just the way we would like them to. I'm going to implement this and see if it helps us with our situation. The only catch I can see (which has nothing to do with BB and everything to do with human nature) is that our more regular attendees who are used to adding their name repeatedly may continue doing so. I am considering bolding the text that reads "Register later (The guest can provide this information when checking in to the event)" so as to make it stand out.

Awesome. AND good idea to bold

We are suffering this same problem. I have no idea why this behaviour exists because I cannot think of any circumstance where someone would want the same person listed in an event twice as opposed to being 1 person + guest. NetCommunity dealt with it fine.

I tried the register guests anonymously route but it allows that box to be ticked for both registrants and we lose out on a load of information we do want. Having to manually change records is preferable to this.

Daniel Noga 2 · September 2016

We are suffering this same problem. I have no idea why this behaviour exists because I cannot think of any circumstance where someone would want the same person listed in an event twice as opposed to being 1 person + guest. NetCommunity dealt with it fine.

I tried the register guests anonymously route but it allows that box to be ticked for both registrants and we lose out on a load of information we do want. Having to manually change records is preferable to this.

It's true that employing this checkbox provides an easy way for people to bypass the contact information lines, but in practice, we find that this makes little difference. People who are registering tickets in advance before they know for sure who they are bringing along will typically just put their own contact info into these lines anyhow. We miss out on the info regardless. Even in some cases where guest names are known and provided, the primary registrant will still put their own contact info into those fields, either because they don't know it all or because they don't feel it's their place to share the contact info of their friends with us without permission.

I do agree that it would be nice if OLX didn't do all of this thinking for us in cases where that box is not employed or not used by the registrants--it's still wrong in my eyes for OLX to arbitrarily create records in our system without a way for us to step in and intervene.

OLX creates multiple separate Participants in Events instead of Guest records

Comments

Categories