Deduplicating - unexpected over-ride behaviour

Question

We're using Civi 4.5.4 and Drupal 7, and finding that the deduping rule is confusing us - or we have a bug.

1. Unexpected duplication of addresses. Contact A (the duplicate) has a home phone, email or postal address Contact B has the same of any of these. We choose not to include these in the duplication merge - we don't check its merge checkbox.

We expect that Contact A's home detail will not be moved over to Contact B. Instead, after the merge we find that Contact B now has an additional home address containing the same email, phone and/or postal address as Contact A. In other words, the merge process is duplicating the home address.

If we do check the merge checkbox, then the merge process over-writes or adds as expected.

Any ideas?

(We did explore using the demo site, but it was in Russian, and we weren't sure if it was wise or kind to set it to English for our purposes, nor how to do this.)

Answer 1

This does sound like a bug with 4.5.x. But it's worth noting that a lot of effort has gone in to improving the dedupe process in 4.7.x, and there are now automated tests in the core suite that test this sort of thing.

If you cannot recreate the issue on the demo sites (4.6.x LTS or 4.7.x) then I would say the issue has since been resolved and I would recommend updating to whichever version you feel more comfortable using.