How to prevent duplicate registrations
Normally, most event creators desire that members of their audience register to as many of their events, and as often as possible, as they can. However, there are unique event cases where an event organizer would like to prevent people from having the ability to submit more than one registration to the events they offer.
For example:
You may be offering the same exact workshop but on different dates or times and find that people register themselves to more than one of the sessions because they are not sure which date they would like until some future time and to secure themselves a spot they register to more than one session, only to cancel the other(s) later. This is problematic if you have events with limited spots and can cause all kinds of other issues where event management is concerned.
There are all kinds of other event examples which may necessitate restricting people from registering for more than one event. There are also times when, for one reason or another, a registrant may try to submit more than one registration to the same event. This can be for some functional purpose, or it may be accidental, such as they forgot they already registered for it some time ago, or it may be some kind of malicious activity. Whatever it may be, this help doc will explain what is possible and what is not possible when it comes to these kinds of situations.
Is it possible to restrict people from registering more than once for the same event?
Yes, Corsizio always prevents duplicate registrations to the same event by default based on the same exact name and email address combination.
(If, on the other hand, you would like people to have the ability to submit duplicate registrations to the same event for some reason, then you can toggle it on as an option in Step 5, when creating or editing your event. It is "off" by default.)
Therefore, if a person tries to submit a registration with the same exact name and email address to the same event, the system will not permit them to do so. They will be alerted that this is a duplicate registration and not accepted.
While this will greatly reduce your chances of receiving duplicate registrations to the same event, it is not possible to eliminate this from happening entirely due to how people can abuse the system by creating different variations of their name or using a different name, or a different email address.
Of course, as always, it is important to monitor your event registrations to be aware of who is registering for any of your events and to catch and deal with any problematic activity promptly.
NOTE: In cases where parents are trying to register several of their children for the same event, duplicate registrations should never be created because, as the Corsizio registration form clearly says, it is the name of the "attendee" or "participant" that is to be entered in the first field visible on the registration. You may create a custom field to capture the parent's name later down on the registration form if needed, but the name of the attendee must always be the name of the actual person attending the event and to whom the event is geared to, and not necessarily the person doing the registering.
Is it possible to restrict people from registering for more than one event?
There is no easy way to prevent people from registering to more than one event that you offer using Corsizio.
When using a public registration system, as is Corsizio, published events are visible to the public and event registrants do not create their own accounts in order to register for an event through which you could control or limit their registration access. This means that anyone can register to any of the events that you offer, unless you restrict registrations based on an email domain or passcode.
In order to restrict people from registering for more than one of the events you offer, registrants would need to have their own login to the portal where your events are offered, within which you would create a restriction based on some parameter. For example, the person may be granted a token or credit to only register for one event, or the other events may have prerequisites that must be fulfilled before registration to them is allowed. Any of these examples, and more, are only possible in private registration systems or on private intranet networks, such as those found within higher education institutions or large companies.
When you publish events on Corsizio for which you would like to accept registrations, interested people can register for as many events as you offer, as there is no easy or foolproof way to restrict them from doing so. You cannot do it by email address since many people today have more than one email address or can easily create one. Likewise, you cannot do it based on their name because people can easily provide a variation of their name or a fake name altogether. Any information that they are asked to submit can be manipulated in a way that prevents from enforcing any kind of restriction on registering for more than one event. This is why, as shared above, a truly effective restriction can only be accomplished on private registration systems where the registrant has to create an account that can be limited or controlled in some way.
Solutions:
The easiest thing that you can do if you would like people not to register for more than one of your events is to communicate with them your event registration policy via the event description in Step 3 when creating your event. You can reiterate this in summary form as a custom message on the registration form using a heading for even more emphasis and noticeability.
For example, you can let them know that your policy for duplicate registrations to more than one event will result in cancellations. You will only honor the first registration that came in from them, and all subsequent ones will be canceled. Of course, this will require you to monitor all your event registration activity closely to catch and cancel the registration(s) of anyone who registers for more than one of your events.
While this may not completely eliminate the chance of someone registering for more than one of your events, it will reduce the chances of it happening, and you are informing your audience about the consequences if they do.
An alternative option, albeit one that may require a lot of work, is to use the restrict by passcode feature on Corsizio. This would consist of you creating unique and different passcodes for each of your events and only sharing a specific event passcode with someone when they contact you and express interest in registering for that specific event. After you approve them to register, you would give them the passcode with which to register. As you can imagine, this is a very arduous task to manage your registrations in such a controlled manner, and it almost defeats the need for an online registration service if you are going to do most of the interaction and screening manually. And still, there is no guarantee that someone will not share the passcode they were given with someone else. Therefore, it is not recommended for the purpose of preventing duplicate registrations to more than one event.