Registration and the Admin Form

For people to signup for an event, they must be in the people database. Registering is what adds a person to the people database.

If you have setup new-user messages, a person who gets registered with an email addresss will be sent an announcement about how to use your PRESTO website. Similarly if you later give an email-less user an email address, she will be sent the new-user message at that time.

Filling In the Registration Form

• Name. Enter at least a first and last name. Enter parenthesized text when a person's informal name is different than his full name. For example, if John Q Public III liked being called John Public, one would enter John, (Q), and Public (III). Administrators would see John (Q) Public (III), but John would see "John Public" when he logged in, and so on.

  If someone else has the name you entered:
  Every person in the database must have a unique name. If PRESTO reports that the name you entered is already in use, just alter what you entered. For example, you could enter a nickname, add a middle name/initial, or include parenthesized text anywhere in the name.

• Email Address. A person enters this to login, and this is where PRESTO sends messages to this person. If you want an email-less person to be able to login, enter an email addresss that ends with @no.email (e.g. john@no.email).

  (Note: if a user's email address becomes obsolete (i.e. the webmaster starts to get non-delivery notices for her), you can append .bad to her registration's email address. Doing so causes her Logins to display an error box telling her to provide a valid email address).

• Phone Numbers. Including an area code in phone numbers is preferred. Also if you have an alternate phone number, you may enter it in the 2nd phone field (and preface it with a short comment about when it might be of use, if desired).
• State. State should be a 2-letter abbreviation.
• Universe. Where she lives
• Privileges. Self Only or See All Signups is the proper setting for most people. People with the 1st setting can only see their own info. People with the 2nd can click on a zoom checkbox on the self-signup page to see who else is signed up.

  The Observer and Agent settings enable a person to view everyone's registration info and signups, send email announcements, and generate reports. An Agent can also signup other people (using the See/Do Signups button near the top of Self-Signup Home). The Admin setting enables a person to do all of the above, plus add and remove arbitrary content from the website. So this privilege would normally be given out very sparingly.

• Expires. If you have people in your database whose status expires at some point — such as dues paid thru some date, you may enter the date at which the expiration occurs. When a Search is done, the Expires column is color coded: green for unexpired, amber for expiring, and so on.

Notes:

1. After registering (or updating) someone, on the next Register you can click on Load Last Person's Info to start a Register with that person's info.
2. In addition to any roles defined for your group, you can use the PRESTO-defined roles: guest, sponsor, and inactive.

The Standard Admin Enter-Later Value: ???

Sometimes you need to distinguish between a blank value and no value entered yet. In particular, suppose you create a new required field that only the user can properly enter. Suppose also that a need arises for an admin (or agent) to update other fields in the user's database record before the user has done that. If the admin did nothing special, the Update would fail because a required field was left blank. Conversely you do not want the admin to enter an improper value.

To handle such cases, the admin should enter ??? in the field when doing the update (either manually or via Import):

• When the user displays the form, she will still see a blank for the field. And if the field is a required field and she leaves it blank, she will still get an error.
• The user will get error as usual if she tries to enter ??? herself in a numeric or date field.
• If you want an admin to be able to enter ??? in a menu field, include ??? in the definition of the field's menu items.

This feature can be used for optional fields as well. Perhaps you want to output reports to keep track of which users have filled in a value for some new form field. If so, when you define the field, you should also:

• Do an Export People (or an Export Signups if it was a signup form).
• Make line 1 of the export file contain name=??? for that field.
• Do an Import, and thereby make every person (or signup) contain ??? for that field.

Delete, Undelete, and Expunge

Click on Delete to remove the person from the people database.

A normal Delete does not delete historical signup data. If you view an old event's signups, this person's Registration Info will still be accessible — and contain an Undelete button. (Conversely if you later try to re-register this person, it will fail while telling you the old event. You can then do a Signups Per Person for that event to get to and Undelete the person, thereby re-activating her old registration info).

If Expunge Signups is checked, clicking on Delete deletes both the person and ALL signups the person owns. If you don't care about historical signup info, you can do this for anyone. Otherwise it is mostly for getting rid of malicious users who have created bogus signups.

Note: If Expunge is done from a signup page, click on your browser's reload/refresh button afterwards to see the changes.

Related Features

After a Register, Update, Delete, or Undelete is done, the change is sent to the Email Address for DB Changes if any (see the Configure Group page).