Email addresses for users

[FatherBear]

I have a number of elderly members who do not have an email address and most do not have a computer or access to one at all. S2Member demands an email address so I gave it my own as the address as it will not accept a blank. It rejects them all as duplicate email addresses. Can I alter S2Member to allow either no email or duplicate email addresses. I am only entering their membership for record purposes to avoid keeping another database.

[Raam Dev]

FatherBear,

This isn't enforced by s2Member, it's enforced by WordPress itself.

If you have a GMail account and you're adding all these s2Member accounts yourself, here's a way you could solve this:

GMail allows you to create aliases "on the fly" by simply adding a plus symbol and then an extra word. For example, if your email address was fatherbear@gmail.com, you could use a different address for each account like this: fatherbear+bob@gmail.com, fatherbear+joe@gmail.com, fatherbear+kate@gmail.com, etc.

Any email sent to those addresses will simply go to your fatherbear@gmail.com account. (If you want to filter out those emails in GMail, you can set up a filter that checks for the full To address and moves it to a separate tag.)

Does that sound like it will work for you?

[FatherBear]

Raam, thanks for that because it will work around the WordPress methodology but I had hoped someone would suggest a change in the php to simply allow either no email or accept a duplicate.

[Raam Dev]

Unfortunately such a change would require extensive changes to the WordPress code PHP code -- it wouldn't be a small change. Such a change would also make it very messy to upgrade WordPress in the future.