Make sending emails and collecting phone numbers optional

Phone numbers and email address are NEVER shown to the public with the sign up sheets plugin, so there is no privacy/security concern there. The public doesn’t even see full names for sign-ups. Since people can’t always be trusted to type their email correctly, a phone number is a good alternate means of contact, and a much faster method of contacting volunteers if something changes at the last moment.

However, I will keep this here and consider adding another option to make the phone field optional.

If you don’t want the automatic reminder emails, you simply don’t enter anything in the reminder fields when you create a new sign-up sheet and no reminders will be sent. If you do that, then the only emails that get sent are a confirmation email right after they sign up, along with a notice email to the committee chairs. That’s pretty standard for signing up for anything via the web, and any one who marks those emails as spam clearly has some issues.

Also, on a related note, you can install an SMTP plugin on your site to make WordPress use a SMTP email account to send outgoing emails, which you could then configure to use a Gmail or other off-server email account to send emails if you are worried that your server will be shut down for simply sending sign-up confirmation emails.

I understand… no online data is ever 100% safe, but a phone number is not much of a security issue like a SSN would be, and most phone companies are already selling your phone numbers to marketers anyway. If people are that paranoid about their phone numbers and emails, then they shouldn’t even be online at all. Most hackers are much more interested in accessing email accounts so they can send their spam, so they best thing you can do is to set it up so that all your WordPress users are forced to use very strong passwords, and never use “admin” as the user name for your admin account.

Also, if you are requiring users to be logged in, then the fields on the sign-up forms will be pre-filled, so they won’t have to type them in each time.

Wordpress and this plugin are open source, so you could freely modify the plugin to make the phone field not required, or to remove it entirely. Any one with just a little bit of PHP knowledge could easily make those changes.

Again, though, I will definitely keep this in mind as a potential future option, and this one wouldn’t be too much work to implement. I obviously can’t implement every single feature request, as the plugin would become unwieldy and be too confusing with the amount of settings/options needed to implement everything. That’s why I set up this new feature request forum, as an easy way for me to keep track of feature requests, and eventually pick the most popular ones if and when I decide to include more features.

At the same time, any body is free to take this plugin and fork it into an entirely new plugin, as that’s originally how this plugin got started (a modification of an existing plugin to fit the needs of our school’s PTA site).

Also, for a quick fix to make phone optional, you can edit the class-pta_sus_public.php file and remove line 91 that looks like this:

|| empty($_POST[‘signup_phone’])

delete that entire line, and you shouldn’t get an error message if you leave the phone field blank.

If you don’t want to send out the sign-up confirmation emails, which is also copied to the event chair emails, you can delete lines 156-158 in the same file, which look like this:

if ($emails->send_mail($wpdb->insert_id) === false) {
$this->messages .= apply_filters( ‘pta_sus_public_output’, __(‘ERROR SENDING EMAIL’, ‘pta_volunteer_sus’), ’email_send_error_message’ );
}

The Phone field is now optional in version 1.7 released today. See the main settings page… there is a new checkbox that you can check to remove the phone field.