With the creation of a new lab, a lot of people are updating their affiliation in their profile. Nevertheless, if they are added to a cloned event, their old affiliations are displayed insted of the updated ones even if they are removed and readded to the contribution. It looks like the person and its affiliation is cached at the event level. Did I miss something?
Michel
This is intentional: After all, you were speaking as a member of institute X during some past event, so just because you change affiliations later it does not mean you are not retroactively representing institute Y in all the past events.
You can edit the event-level persons on the “Participant roles” page in event management. This can still be overridden on the contribution level but unless you changed something for a speaker there, it will use the default coming from the event person (the one shown on the “participant roles” page).
The identity-related data are copied to each event, yes.
This concerns affiliation, writing of the name, academic titles, everything. (I am not sure about the email address.)
That means, whenever it is edited in the event afterwards, this edit will remain persistent. If the origin (user profile) is modified, it will not propagate to all events/contributions.
However, you seem to report, @jouvin, that the data are not taken from the profile, if the same person is removed from and event and added again. Or did you really mean contributions (which I guess are taken from the data in the event registration/participant)?
@ThiefMaster, maybe you can clarify: Are the personal data copied from profile to event level and from there to contributions, or do data in contributions of the same event remain linked (identical) to each other? How does it work exactly? Maybe such a paragraph could go into the documentation.
An event person is currently never removed, even if it becomes “dangling” (nothing in the event referencing it). So once a person has been added to an event, you always have to edit them on the participant roles page; nothing will be taken from their profile at that point.
That fits my experience/memory and apparently @jouvin’s observations, too. Thank you for the fast ack!
The current implementation is totally correct for existing events: you certainly don’t want affiliation being updated in past events. But IMO, there is something wrong when it comes to cloned events. I you clone a past event to make a new one (typically in the future), you do want to have the updated information. And you (at least I!) don’t want to chase changed affiliations and edit them manually. It would be desirable IMO to refresh the information from the profile when you clone an event, or at least to have the option to do it. Currently, I don’t see how to do it from the role management page: there is no way to refresh it or delete the cached information…
In our case, with the creation of IJCLab from a merger of 5 labs, it concerns several 100s of accounts (IJCLab is 800 people, not all of them with an Indico account).
Michel
You are absolutely right, and we already have an issue for this 
Sorry then, I should have checked… Thanks!