dev/core#3782 Remove rule that stops signing up for a membership if matched contact already has a cancelled on of that type

[mattwire]

Overview

A client had intermittent reports from people not being able to sign-up (for a membership) and being redirected to civicrm%2Fcontribute%2Ftransact instead of to the payment processor (though it turns out the same thing happens whatever payment processor you use).

After a lot of work troubleshooting and adding debug I finally tracked it down to the following error:
Your %1 membership was previously cancelled and can not be renewed online. Please contact the site administrator for assistance.
But that error was not being reported back to the client and I had to log the contents of $this->_errors in CRM_Core_Form::validate() to find out what was going on.

I don't really understand why #3531 ever got merged given that it seems no-one was in favour of restricting memberships in this way: https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-14645

Proposal: Just remove the code. If anyone actually needs it they could easily add it via a validateForm hook.

Before

Cannot signup for a membership via contribution page if matched contact has a cancelled membership of that type.

After

Can signup for a membership via contribution page if matched contact has a cancelled membership of that type.

Technical Details

Comments

[civibot]

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[agileware-justin]

Agree with this PR.

Will need CIviCRM documentation updates as well, when merged.

[demeritcowboy]

jenkins retest this please

[demeritcowboy]

This seems ok just that the scenario 1 in the original ticket now results in a membership of type A being converted to a membership of type B, e.g. if you have the below situation, and then the person renews online and picks Student, the General now becomes Student. But that's maybe ok, just might not be what the person really intended and they were just confused about what they currently had and what they were renewing.

In the scenario in the PR here I (as the member) did get notified on screen about the error (without the PR applied) but maybe there are some setups where the error is hidden.