Andy Burns

Spam protection is never perfect. Some junk contacts will still get into CiviCRM. First thing is to stop the spam, and then clean up your CRM afterwards. One easy cleanup trick is to use SearchKit with regex to find names that look machine-generated: That looks for a first or last name that is: For example: […]

If you’re using CiviCRM Form Builder, there are two simple ways I use to keep junk submissions from turning into junk CRM data. Cloudflare Turnstile With the Form Protection extension, Turnstile can now be added to Form Builder forms under the “Elements” tab. It works like reCAPTCHA, but without making people identify bicycles and traffic

CiviCRM’s current menu cannot be evolved much further. Over time, it has added more items in more places. Efforts via extensions such as Duct Tape are valiant to make the problem better by reducing clutter. On many installs I have moved all admin config menu items under the “Administer” menu item and disabled all that

CiviCRM is free to download, but it is not free to maintain, improve, secure, document, or support. There’s an essential core team and a host of partners providing services to nonprofits, and neither runs on hope and wishes. They need funding to make it all go around. It also works quite differently from a typical

A client recently encountered two problems in its CiviCRM system. As part of my operational support plan, this allows an open partnership to surface issues without the fear of hourly bills being racked up. The first was a bug in the CiviCRM Event Organiser WordPress plugin registration defaults. I investigated the problem and contributed a

CiviCRM released a security update yesterday for 6.15.3 and 6.10 ESR, addressing a longer-than-usual list (16) vulnerabilities, including stored XSS, SQL injection, unauthorized file access, and an RCE issue. I expect we may continue seeing more of these security releases in the short run. AI is making security vulnerabilities easier to find, easier to test,

With the World Cup just about here starting on June 11, I have thought about this small organization called The Ball I recently learned about. Here’s how they describe it (from https://theball.tv/about/): On The Ball’s epic journey to the World Cup, it is played with in organised games of football, in kick-abouts and in juggling

Event Organiser has always been a strong WordPress event plugin with a solid data model. It’s my go-to for WordPress CiviCRM event management. Why? It gives you a real event post type, venues, recurring events, mapping, and a litany of functions to retrieve data to display in templates. It also works well with WordPress theme

When moving your email management from Mailchimp to CiviCRM, don’t just import the names and email addresses of the active subscribers and call it good. Preserve the email status (subscribers, unsubscribes and bounces) so you bring in like for like as a historical record. Your level of detail depends on budget and usefulness of granularity.

I had a demo call recently where an organization told me their EveryAction CRM cost jumped from $325/mo to $1,166/mo after their contact count grew to around 28,000 contacts. That is not a small increase. The worse part? They said they received no notice and while it might have been buried in an email, they