Dealing with duplicate registrations

Unfortunately there is no fail-safe means by which MMM can detect that the same person has registered more than once on MMM. When this happens it can be a source of confusion for both the user (which login do I use?) and for a club membership secretary (which login is the one they use?).

While adult registrants have to give a unique email address there's nothing stopping them from registering more than once with different email addresses (many people have multiple email addresses). Family members (children under 16) have to be entered by an adult and an email is optional so there is even more scope to enter their child twice - especially if one parent does so without consultation with the other.

MMM allows duplicate names simply because it's quite possible to have different people with the same name and, besides, it's also possible for a duplicate registrant to use a slight deviation in characters used for their name (they could have written OSullivan on one and O'Sullivan in another). So until MMM gets smarter about all this, duplicates are inevitable.

For a club membership secretary, duplicates do become obvious when searching for names in the membership list in Manage members. When looking up a member it is always advisable to enter as few characters as possible to "home in" on the member better - typically by typing in the first few letters of their last name. A duplicate member will then become quite obvious as the same name with similar details would be listed in the search.

In order to ascertain which is the right one, the first thing to identify is which one has an active membership subscription. If one does have a membership subscription and the other does not then the one without is most likely the duplicate. It is also worth checking the Analysis tab on the member details. This lists a count of all sorts of things that the member has engaged with. The more numbers that are listed the more established that member record is in the system and thus can be assumed to be the original.

If, on the analysis tab, you find that the member has no numbers in all the items listed except for just one membership with the club then this user record is definitely "virgin". In which case, you are empowered to delete this user record entirely. You'll find a Delete option in the Actions tab that does this. This is the best way to remove duplications recently entered by a member.

However, if the duplicate user has been involved in any activity whatsoever with the club (or any other club) then the delete option is not available and the next best thing is to remove the user as a member of the club using the Remove action.

If the duplicate happens to have been made a member of two sections of the same overall club (e.g. tennis and squash sections) then you would have to remove them from one of the club sections before being able to delete them entirely as described above.