Some people really are too incompetent to fill out a form, make their payment, and then confirm that the process has worked for them. Then when they show up for the event expecting a spot we have no record of them. We don't even have a record of them "attempting" to sign up.
Would it be too much to ask, to have DTRegister log the failed registration attempts? Or, all registration attempts that make it into the cart at the least. If it's sitting in the cart, their must be some sort of permanent record of it somewhere?
The system must be taking this into account somewhat because often there are missed numbers in the "Confirmation Number" column. I'm going to assume that the missed numbers are either a bug (doubtful), or a registration that was not completed for some reason (payment did not go through, person did not complete the registration form, registration timed out before it was completed, etc), and the Confirmation Number for this record has been "taken" so the next registrant gets assigned the next registration number in the system.
If DTRegister was to log the registration attempt when the registration hit the cart, or when "Payment Type" was picked, not when payment was approved, we would at least have a record of the registrations that have not gone through. Then we can trouble shoot people that try multiple times to register and it does not work for some reason. We would even be able to "Accept" their registration on the back end and allow them to just log in and pay, instead of having them fill out their form for the 20th time (they are already frustrated, why make them do something again that we could potentially have the information for already? That would be great customer service). We would also have a record of the people that "think" they have signed up but their payment did not go through. When they show up, we could accept cash, and have all their information already, because they have already filled out the form.
The other thing this would help with would be disconnects between third party payment processors and DTRegister. It doesn't happen often, but there are times that we have had registration payments go through but there has been a timeout on either our site or the payment processors site and the payment has not come back to DTRegister. So the consumer has paid, but the system does not report it. So now we have someones money and when they show up for the event with their payment receipt we have no idea who they are or what they are there for. It is a little embarrassing to say the least! And a pain in the butt to figure out when we are running multiple events and have a lot of payments coming through our system.
This must be a feature that almost everyone using DTRegister would find useful?
Would anyone else out there find this information helpful?
I'm sure every one of us has had to help someone trouble shoot a registration at some point, would this information not help speed up this process immensely? Again, why have them fill out the information again if we had it at our finger tips? Trouble-shooting over the phone with someone who can barely turn on their computer is extremely frustrating. Having their information logged already would be a HUGE asset during this process.
If anyone else has any suggestions on other ways this could be done I would love to hear them and have them incorporated into a future release of DTRegsiter.
Thanks
