CiviEvent backing out of contact change from dedupe rule

Question

Is there a way to "back out" a change caused by a dedupe rule on an event administratively?

• I see two records with the same name, Person A.

• I have had a dedupe rule on an Event that was incorrect. I have changed the rule back to a reserved rule that is working OK. The custom dedupe rule was supposed to use Name, Email, and Phone but obviously isn't working. The reserved rule just uses Name and Email.

• One person (Person A) registered for an event and it inadvertently edited someone else's contact record (Person B).

• Somehow this also changed Person B's WordPress User email.

• Person B got an email that their WordPress email was changed to Person A's email, and to contact an administrator if this was not correct. Person B contacted me.

If there is any method to avoid having to ask both contacts for all their information again to confirm, that would be great.

I am not familiar on how to view the logs for the activities, so if the information would be there it would be great to know how to view the logs.

Thanks, Michele

Answer 1

If you have logging on then via the ChangeLog tab on the Contact you should be able to garner some of the required info

If that doesn't help enough then go to the log_civicrm_contact/event/contribution etc tables and fire in the relevant ID and see what it has to offer

Key thing with dedupe rules is to make sure your Weights and Thresholds make mathematical sense - esp when fields like Phone and Email will be 'scored' for every match it finds - so if a contact has the same email three times, then dedupe will score 3 x email weight.

Hence it is important to have a rule like First 10 Last 10 Email 2 = Threshold 22 (ie it would have to the same email on the contact 11 times for it to count as a dedupe while ignoring First and Last) - whereas eg First 5 Last 5 Email 5 = Threshold 15 means it could match on a record that has the email 3 times (which is quite possible) even though the First and Last do NOT match.