I have been the Root Administrator since 2008, when our class website began on Classcreator. An issue with a duplicate name needs verification. At first glance, the name of this new person was a name that I knew had already joined our site back in 2011, when we were getting ready for our 40th class reunion in 2012. At the top of his profile page, it showed his name. I continued down the page and saw my Admin note with a different classmate’s name. That said, I continued to the class list in Managing Classmates, where I found the original member and a duplicate name with the original name replaced. The first original name joined the site in 2011, and the duplicate name joined in 2025.

My question or concern is: How did someone change the original name to a different name? As an administrator for as long as I have, I thought I had taken all the necessary steps to keep our site secure.

Any thoughts? Or has anyone else experienced this issue?

If you don't have Admin Verify turned on in Preferences, anyone can join as one of your non-joined members and then change the name and do whatever any joined member can do.

Actually, they can join using any unjoined member name - even if you DO have Admin Verify on, but in that case they can't do anything or see any restricted pages until you verify them and turn them loose - or decide it's a hijack and choose to revert that profile to it's original status and name.

Hi Mac,

When someone joins the admin gets a new join notification that should show if the name was altered. This is sometime fine as the individual may have changed their name listed from Robert to Bob etc, however, it also shows if the name was changed entirely.

If a user forgot their password or no longer has access to an old email address to retrieve it they may think it is okay to just join again and just picked a name that had not joined. This is why we notify admins of the join and outline what changed so you are clear which name was added and what name it was added under in case you need to add that name back in.

So it is working as intended and the classmate may have just taken a shortcut by trying to join under another name rather than reaching out to admins for assistance.

If their information does not look consistent with what you know about the classmate you can delete their entry under Admin Functions > Manage Classmates and they will no longer be able to login.

We also offer a verification option under Admin Functions > Preferences where you can turn on that option and new joins remain pending until an admin has verified them.

Jessica
Class Creator Support