Does the E-Mail have to be unique in a Registration Form?

[pferreir]

Funny, because we had a similar post a few days ago:

Registering multiple visitors at the same time

Hello, we have one “problem” with indico at the moment and that is that we host multiply family events a year, where one person should be able to register himself and his family members with one registration, because the kids often dont have an emailaddress of their own. We want to see that one person registered 4 attendees and those 4 tickets should be substracted from the total ticket contingent. Is this somehow possible at the moment?

I think this is definitely a use case that we should address in some way. I’m not sure whether removing the uniqueness constraint is the way to go, though. Another thing I had thought of were “lightweight registrants”, who would basically be registered by another person and linked to him/her. They wouldn’t have the same privileges as a normal registrant, but the organizer would nonetheless be able to print tickets for them, etc…

I think there are two different situations at play here:

• People who just don’t want to provide their e-mail;
• Participants who by definition have no e-mail address (e.g. children) or “collective participants” (e.g. families).

I believe the second one is a very reasonable use case, but I’m not that sure about the first. We have to keep in mind that not requiring an e-mail (or allowing duplicates) will mean opening hand of what is currently the only way we have to unify participants across events. From the moment the e-mail stops being a “primary key”, we can no longer trust that a certain event belongs on someone’s profile. That applies to everyone on the system.