How to Stop 2 People from Registering with the Same Email Address

[Troy_Larson1]

Hey There,

I'm sure someone has asked this in the past, however I couldn't find a thread on it, so I figured I'd ask it. My question is this: How Do You Stop 2 Different People from Registering For An Event With The Same Email Address?

We get a lot of people who register for our live events who also register a co-worker and they end up using their email address for both. So for example, John & Jeff want to attend. John registers himself using john@awesomeco.com. He then registers his co-worker Jeff and uses John@awesomeco.com. We've noticed that Marketo will override John's name and place Jeff's name in the reg list and in Marketo. So not only will John not show up as being registered anymore but also his name in the DB will be overwritten. We want to stop this. Has anyone else figured out a way to pro-actively stop this from happening?

Thanks!

-Troy

[SanfordWhiteman]

Block field updates to the canonical First and Last Name fields and publish proxy fields on your form instead. Then you can more intelligently pre-process attempts by users to "self-service" their lead fields, which is in effect what's happening here.

Of course you have to declare that First and Last Name are not self-serviceable at all in your particular case, because you won't know if someone legitimately changed or corrected their name from John to Jeff, or if another human was behind it.

[Iason_Kubrakov]

Hi! 

I have the same issue. Can you please tell me more about proxy fields. What is it? How can I setup them?

Thank you in advance.

[SanfordWhiteman]

A proxy field is simply a custom field with the same datatype as another "master" field.

The proxy is used to intelligently pre-screen field updates -- like self-service requests by leads -- so they do not always overwrite the master field.

Without proxies, you have to either always allow or always block updates from a given source.