Duplicate User Email Addresses
This release deals with the thorny issue of duplicate email addresses in Infusionsoft and how they affect your membership site.
Beginning with this release, a new option setting is provided in the “Plugin Options” admin panel (“Allow duplicate Infusionsoft users?“) through which you can define whether your membership site will accept – or not – logins when a primary email address exists more than once in your Infusionsoft database.
The default is set to “No” to maintain compatibility with the current behavior. You may set it “Yes”, in which case the plugin will only look for a matching email address and password, disregarding the fact that the email address may exist several times.
Over the past years, I have been an ardent opponent of allowing logins when the email addresses exists multiple times. I still think that it’s not a “best practice” and I do not recommend it. Over time, things may get out of hand with members having different passwords for the same site yet with different access levels. It is and will always be best to avoid the propagation of duplicates.
Over the past weeks, however, several infusionWP users have brought up cases which, although they do no diminish the validity and desirability of maintaining the uniqueness of primary email addresses, have illustrated that in certain cases, especially when a site is migrating from other systems, requiring this uniqueness puts them in a position of not being able to work with infusionWP at all. In one case, there were several thousand duplicate email addresses.
Ultimately, those are your sites and your CRM’s. It is and should be your call to make. And now, beginning with v3.2.004, you can.