I have been puzzling, reading code and wondering about this one for a while now. What I would like to achieve is to remove the obligation to have unique email addresses in extended users. In other words, allow two or more accounts to share the same email address. This should technically be possible as long as the technical account name is unique.

My reason for this is as follows. We are running a small twirling sports club. Most of our members are below the age of 18, and most of those minors do not have their own email address yet. So we use their parents' email address when creating an account for them. But some families have more than one kid who's a member of our sports club... So for those families we can now only create one account which they will have to share between the members. We work around this by entering the names of the other members who are part of the same family in a text field that I created on the template.

It would be great if the requirement that each account must have a unique email address could be lifted. Maybe by adding some setting to configure this?

By the way, we are *not* using extended users to allow self-service on creation of accounts. All accounts are created by the webmaster.

Thanks for your consideration !

[KK]

I am not sure if you are aware of this - the email can be used instead of the username while logging in (i.e. it serves at par with the username). This necessitates enforcing its uniqueness.

Making any changes to this arrangement will require far reaching changes in the core. So, I am sorry but there is little we can do with this issue.

[trendoman]

@brightwolf, wouldn't it be best to use fake emails in the system 'email' field? Plus, establish relation between users (why not use extended users?) and add another email field 'reply-to' - so all communication goes to that field's email, instead of the fakes.

Hi KK, I understand this could imply some deep design changes that might have a lot of effect everywhere in the code... not something I dare to ask for.

And thus Trendoman's idea becomes more apparent. Thanks Trendoman, your idea is worth considering. Will give it a try, maybe use fake email address everywhere and use a template field to replace the role of the 'standard email address'. The new email address field could be presented to the users in the same way as they are used to. The only downside would be that they would not be able to login using their normal email address anymore but would be forced to use the user name. Hm. Wil have to think and test a bit here!

[trendoman]

Users can be privileged to be given a domain-based email such as username@our-twirling-club.com to serve the login purpose and make emails look better than random fake ones. They will not be able to login using their original shared email, as @KK explained, because there is no way for the system to understand who is trying to log in. With a custom email scheme, even minors can be given a decent-looking email. It is worth considering giving users an ability to converse via some club chat to justify the use of domain in email.

Actually, any kind of unique information can be used to log in - email, phone, passphrase, picture etc. Couch, of course, expects only username/password, but nothing limits you to fetch username from the database and feed it to Couch, if user gives you a unique phone number associated with username.