Anti-Spam Law compliance & Mail Chimp plugin

Hi Tuan & forum,

I'm trying to find a way to abide by the Canada Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) regulations wherein I require "express consent" in order to add people to our MailChimp mailing list. I need to somehow give registrants the option to subscribe, and not assume that if they provide their email address (and an email address is required for registration) that I can send them further email.

One work around I've thought of is to have a conditional email field that is auto-filled with the registrants email address from the core EMAIL field, but the field will only appear on the form if the user checks off the "Please add me to the mailing list" checkbox. The question is, in order to make this work: Is there a way to fill a custom field with the value of another field?

Fail that I guess I would have to modify the MailChimp plugin to look at the registration record for a valid "Please add me the the mailing list" custom field before it passes the email address through to MailChimp.

Any other suggestions on how I can make this work so that I'm not breaking the law in regards to our Anti-Spam legislation? This is something that ultimately affects ALL Canadian organization using the MailChimp plugin or any means of creating email lists.

PS: I've been away from the office for the past 2 months, helping out at home with our new baby (our sixth!). You should start to see me back here in the forums again

Hi James

Don't worry. It is supported out of the box. You just need to create a radio custom field with two options Yes/No

Something like Subscribe to our newsletter Yes/No

Then go to Extensions -> Plugins, find the plugin Events Booking - Mailchimp plugin , click on it to edit

There is a field called Subscribe Newsletter Field. Select the custom field which you created above

Then when users subscribe, if they select Yes, they will be added to newsletter. If they select No, they won't be subscribed

And congratulations for your new baby. I had a new baby, too, but she is 14 months now. I only have two at the moment, first child is nearly 5 years old now. I wish I could have six like yours, but my plan is 3 only

Tuan

Hi Tuan,
I saw the field selection box in the plugin, but thought it was for selecting the field that contained the email address, which doesn't make sense when I think about it now because the email would come from the email field. :whistle: :pinch:
Thanks for getting me straightened out

Is there any way to set the default list so that a list is always selected for new events?

Hi James

Not possible at the moment. However, it could be a nice small improvement, I can make it in the next release

Tuan

I implemented it quickly. Added a new parameter called Default List IDs. You can enter IDs of the lists which you want to be selected by default (need to view source code of the page or inspect elements to see these IDs of lists, but I think you can do that)

Please update to this version of the plugin, then try again and let me know if it works

Tuan

Revisiting my MailChimp plugin settings a year after this post, I no longer see the Subscribe Newsletter Field field.
If this was changed in an update, how do I now designate my Subscribe custom field?


The field is still present in the ACYmailing plugin.

Hi James

We don't have this option available anymore. Registrants will be assigned to mailing lists configured under each event, they could not choose it from custom field anymore

If you need that old behavior, you will need to use the plugin from older version. You can try to get this file, unzip it, upload the received files to plugins/eventbooking/mailchimp folder on your site. It should work like old version you were having

Tuan

Thanks Tuan!

Just getting around to fixing this on my site.

To conform to Canadian laws, Canadian organizations need the user to provide "express consent" in order to legally add a user to their mailing list. On our registration form, this means that the user must NEVER be subscribed to our list be default, and that they must choose the "Yes, please add me" option in order for us to add them.

Would you please consider re-adding this to the core Event Booking package? All Canadian organizations are breaking the law unless this is re-enabled