? Define Matching ? how to

Your understanding is correct — match criteria are used to determine whether to add new or update. The matcher works down the match list trying the match combinations in order.

We didn’t make phone one of the options for matching, but there is no reason we can’t. I can make this addition within a couple of days.

I can make phone a match option alone or in combination with any standard field. I can’t make make phone in combination with a custom field an option. In other words, I can try to match by phone and then by a custom field, but I can’t combine phone and a custom field in a single match pass — I don’t think that’s what you wanted, but I just wanted to confirm.

Just confirm your need a little further and then give me a day or two to turnover a minor release. My thought would be to add fn/phone and phone as two new match options.

Going through my contact list, I have contacts either having an email or a phone or a name (surprise, yes i have contacts with no name!), i have little use for contacts with no email or phone, so yes, it would be a key matching name+phone+email. Appreciate you releasing it like u mention. ??

On a longer term basis, I would suggest a sort of checkbox to do this key matching, as a kind of “one size fits all solution”, it might yield very interesting results.

Thanks very much for the prompt replies! Cheers!

All set. I have committed this change as Version 2.5.3.

It should momentarily propagate to your plugins page and you can update.

My recommendation would be to set up the match passes in this order:
email
phone
name

Not sure how many possible dups you may have in your database, but you always want to match by the most unique combinations first. If the matcher finds more than one record matching in a given pass, it will fail the match and not reattempt in subsequent passes.

Let me know how it goes for you. I appreciate the feedback.

Is the change in? There seem to be no change for me, i only see under “prioritize combinations to match here”:
email address, firstname
email address
Userdefined.

Unused combi still have no phone option either.

Have you updated the plugin? You need to affirmatively do that on the WordPress plugins panel.

The other possibility is that you didn’t map phone number for this upload — it only shows the matches that are available for the fields you have mapped.