Membership question

[Karen]

Is anyone else getting these weird e-mails from BO?
This is the second one I've received in a week. They mean nothing to me as a membership sec, and no answer from the office when I asked.

A new member has joined your club...
Name: Test110118a Test
BOF Number: 138755
DOB: 26/9/1970
Email:
Contact details withheld at request of member
Level: Local

[frog]

That looks bizarre. I find it hard to believe that if genuinely from BOF the new member realised that when they ticked a don't release details box their club wouldn't be able to contact them. Our memb sec hasn't brought any issues like that to the committee.

[Clive Coles]

This looks like test data to me ~ I'd just ignore it

You will find a few funny fixtures as well if you look in 2014

BOF don't have a separate test environment to enable folk to check out when and if bug fixes they have requested have been introduced ,so a few dummy records seem have been set up by some frustrated testers on the main data base ~ sadly visible to all. Reports and messages do get triggered automatically when new records get set up ~ I guess this is what you noticed.

Once the new software is found to be working, these records should get deleted by those people who set them up. I think this has already been done as I can find no trace of this strange record on enquiring on the Membership system.

[smf]

That looks bizarre. I find it hard to believe that if genuinely from BOF the new member realised that when they ticked a don't release details box their club wouldn't be able to contact them. Our memb sec hasn't brought any issues like that to the committee.

It is genuine, there is a previous post about it here (http://forum.nopesport.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10366&p). BOF have still not amended the form to stop this happening, we still get "Contact details withheld at request of member" regularly.

[Karen]

Thanks smf - I did know about the previous discussion (and contributed to it at the time).
The problem is I have received two of these e-mails within a week, with different weird data. There are no names, only BO numbers and date of birth. I have checked the BO website, and the numbers are not on our club returns so unlikely to be genuine new members who have misguidedly ticked the details withheld box.
No reply from BO, so I'll ignore them till someone complains....

[Paul Frost]

It looks like this may be causing problems for online entry systems as well.

Ticking the box NOT to allow sharing information means that the online entry systems that use that data for auto-completing forms can't access it either.

But I suspect that it's compulsory for British Orienteering to offer the option. Perhaps the wording attached to it could include a warning of the consequences of the choice.

[distracted]

There are some people who choose not to share their data because they just want to take part, and don't want to be constantly contacted by the club asking them to volunteer. They probably only join a club because they have to so that they can also be a member of British Orienteering. Says something about how much benefit there is for some people in being a member of a club...

[Karen]

I have had a reply from BO office to explain my odd e-mails:

"Apologies these will be test members we had to create in order to test something in the system. This was during the renewal process and is unlikely to happen again in future."