WP User Record Created for a Donor

Hi?@genesp

It’s a bit of a long answer, I need to give you a bit of context/explanation.

GiveWP’s primary focus is raising money for your organization, which involves some privacy issues around things like access to the receipt, access to donation history, etc. The last thing we want to do is to expose things like donor address or donation history to unauthorized site visitors.

WordPress itself has a true and battle-tested permissions system (users and user roles) that is best suited for that purpose. At all times, the WordPress user system is aware of the logged-in user, and GiveWP is able to display things conditionally to that particular authenticated user.

GiveWP has a separate system currently for user authentication using email addresses known as “email access” which has served us well over the years, but admittedly does not do as good of a job (especially on sites where caching is involved) with authentication.

It’s a simple matter of scale.

The GiveWP email access system is tested and maintained by a handful of developers. The WordPress user system is tested and maintained by thousands of developers, and deployed in live environments representing billions of active users.

For that reason, we’re eventually (though not immediately) moving away from the email access system toward all donors having user accounts on the site.

Important points:

1. The GiveWP user roles never have additional access to or control over any site data (other than obviously the data pertaining to their OWN donations, and even then it’s read-only.)
2. You as a site admin do not have to tell your donors that they have user accounts on the site. It can be completely hidden from them by disabling the email that is sent with their password reset, and by hiding the admin bar from the top of the page. We’re happy to help with that, and would point you toward some third party plugins to do that hiding of the admin bar.

Happy to answer any additional you may have.

Hi, @genesp.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard back, and I know troubleshooting needs a little extra time. I’m marking this as resolved for now, but if you still have questions, you can send them along right here, and I’ll be happy to hop back in.

Have a great day!

Hello Matheus,

Happy New Year, and thank you for the follow-up.

To preface these comments: I am not a computer programmer, I know just enough to be dangerous, nor are we a commercial operation with programmers on staff, or have a list of subs looking for gig work.

The system is running well. After the initial problems with the Version 3.x update, and my rewriting the donor form in the new version, things settled down. I found some “bugs” which were reported and some UI elements that didn’t make much sense to me (as a donor), those too were reported.

Other than the stress encountered during the last 2 weeks of October, the system is running well. Just in the past 2 days we seamlessly processed over 100 donations, the Zapier / Google Sheets implementation is running perfectly, and we had no problems with Form Field Manager, which is a wonderful Plugin.

I understand the concept of creating a user record for each donor and the challenges with the current e-mail implementation (ran into some of them on a previous campaign).

What surprises me is major changes are made, and we don’t get an e-mail notifying us of the impending change(s). Much of my problems were the time wasted on “discovering” the update’s new functions and the lack of documentation (in one place). And yes, I would like some direction on how to disable the GiveWP newly registered user from receiving a registration email, we do not use registration.

As you may know, I used GiveWP on 2 previous campaigns (V2.x) in 2019 and 2022, we never had a problem, I’d give you a perfect 10 for those experiences.  To be perfectly candid, the rocky start to Version 3.x dampened my enthusiasm for GiveWP, my current campaign is ending soon.

We are discussing a new campaign, which by then, I hope the rollout of Version 3.x has settled down, uncovered most of the bugs, and we will see Version 2.x-like performance.