members with duplicate email addres

WP 3.3.1
s2members version: 111220 (Pro)
gateway: paypal

I’m using s2members for membership management more than content delivery and have hit a serious business problem and am looking for a way round it. Hoping someone can help or point me in the right direction. We run a trust site in support of our local football club and getting people to renew their memberships is vital for the club’s finances. We’ve partly migrated from a manual system and done some online recruitment so have a bit of a mix. The problem I have is that frequently one member might take out membership for various family members, friends etc – it’s kind of a way to donate money to the trust. This type of membership is usually taken out by sending us an email or over the phone. What I’m trying to ascertain is if s2members can support different users with the same email address. I know s2members uses the basic wp user registration functions but I came across a plugin which will do exactly what I want (I think) from a wordpress perspective i.e. allow multiple user accounts with the same email address but wondered if this is a problem encountered by other s2members users or if anyone has given this plugin a tryout with s2members. Plugin is called allow multiple accounts

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/allow-multiple-accounts/

looking through the faq I see that there is a possible issue if another plugin uses the get_user_by() function in wp. Any advice or suggestions would be most welcome

Hi Robert,

As you mentioned, this is a limitation built into WordPress itself. WordPress expects all accounts to have a unique E-Mail address.

You may be able to use a plugin to get around this, but we can make no promises it will work with s2Member.

Other s2Member customers who have encountered similar problems either generated fake email addresses to use when creating the accounts or utilized GMail’s feature for creating email aliases on-the-fly with one email account.

(For example, if you have example@gmail.com, you can also use example+two@gmail.com and Gmail will simply deliver email to that second address to the first account.)