Required registration data

Two fields are always part of the registration form and cannot be removed: Name and Email.

Why these two

Email is the identity of a registration. It is how POM Events recognizes a person, how it prevents the same person registering twice for one event, and how the attendee list identifies who is coming. It is also the only way you can contact an attendee afterwards.

Name is what appears at the door. An attendee list of email addresses is not a door list.

What the form does with them

On submit, the plugin requires both. If either is empty it refuses the registration and asks the visitor to fill in all required fields.

Then:

• if the email address already belongs to a user of the site, that user is used;
• if it does not, a user account is created for it;
• if that address is already registered for this event, the registration is refused with a clear message.

See Registration and user accounts.

The optional fields

Everything else is optional and chosen per event, in Events settings → Registration form → Form fields:

By default, last name, telephone and comments are enabled and country is not. The panel puts it plainly: uncheck the boxes of the optional fields you do not want to show.

Ask for less than you think

Every additional field costs registrations. The form is a modal on a page someone reached from a poster or a social post; each extra box is a reason to abandon it.

A useful test per field: what will we actually do with this?

• A telephone nobody will ring is a field nobody should fill.
• A country you will not use for anything is noise.
• Comments you will not read are a promise you are not keeping.

For most events, name and email are enough.

Consent

If a privacy policy URL is configured under Settings → POM Events → Single event, the form also shows a required consent checkbox and the clause text. That is the third mandatory element in practice, and it should be configured before any real registration is taken. See Privacy and consent copy.

What is stored

For each registration the event stores the email address, and the optional values that were enabled and filled: telephone, comments and country. The name comes from the associated user account.

All of it is personal data. It appears in the attendee panel and in the CSV and XLS exports. See Attendee data and privacy.

Verify

1. Open the form signed out.
2. Submit with the name empty and confirm it is refused.
3. Submit with the email empty and confirm it is refused.
4. Submit a valid registration and confirm the success message.
5. Confirm the row appears in the attendee panel with the values you expect.