Helpful suggestion, not helpful response. To not even have changes flagged for admins/on the user dash makes it difficult to notice, correct and troubleshoot these frequent problems.

Jason, this has NOT been fixed. This is one really serious bug and it has even more implications than people here describe, but I’m not reporting them in public. Please ask Flore Blondel-Goupil for details. I am amazed that Nationbuilder ignores such an important security issue for four years or more.

I just came across this issue when trying to setup a signup form for organizations. If a person already in our nation uses the same email address to signup their business their Person record is converted to an Organization record, the last name is overwritten with the business name, and everything else on the signup form is used to overwrite the existing record – even empty fields overwriting fields that previously had data.

Seems like this can cause data corruption, whether or not the intent is malicious.

I have emailed my point person about this and the main workaround that was suggested is to wrap all signup fields except for email and name with the conditional sorta_logged_in. That would allow/force users to “sorta” log in before updating any additional information on an existing record. This helps keep existing data from being overwritten – if only empty fields are shown on the signup form – but garbage data could still be entered in the empty fields.

The best solution, in my opinion, is what Ethan suggested, “if you enter an email already in the database, you are challenged to log in”.
But an alternate solution, I think, would be to implement the logic used in Imports – put a checkbox on the Signup Settings page that allows Control Panel users to choose whether or not a signup page will Overwrite existing data if it finds a match in the database.

Any movement on this question? Seems like a problem that should be addressed.

At least the form should be set that the user is not logged in and submits an email address that is already in the database, any empty fields are ignored so the database isn’t updated to empty values.

A better response would be that if you enter an email already in the database, you are challenged to log in, and if the address hasn’t been authenticated, to do so BEFORE you can make changes to the users record.

I look forward to your response soon. We’re using this form on a system where we know quite a bit about individuals but they haven’t generally setup profiles on the NationBuilder system.