Contact details for non-registered officials are now always hidden.

Applies to: Club, League and County site admins who manage Officials 

Date of change: 5 August 2026

What's changed? When you add or edit an official on your site, you can choose whether their email address, mobile number and landline number are shown publicly on your Play-Cricket site. From 5 August 2026, that choice is only available for officials who are registered Play-Cricket users. If the official is a temporary member — someone added by name only, who doesn't have their own Play-Cricket account — their email, mobile and landline are now always hidden from the public. The "Hide Email", "Hide Mobile No." and "Hide Landline No." checkboxes are still visible so you can see the setting, but they are ticked and greyed out, with the note: Only registered users can enable the display of this information to the public. This applies both when adding a new official and when editing an existing one.

Your officials are still contactable. This is the important part: hidden does not mean uncontactable. It changes how people get in touch, not whether they can. Where an official's email is hidden, your site displays a "Send Email" button next to their name instead of the address itself. Anyone visiting the site can click it, fill in the contact form, and the message is delivered straight to the official's inbox via Play-Cricket. From the public's point of view it's one extra click; from the official's point of view, their message arrives as normal — but their address was never published. So that this works, make sure every official has an email address recorded. The "Send Email" button only appears where there's an email on the record. Enter it as normal — it stays private, and it's what powers the contact form. Hidden phone numbers are not displayed and don't have a contact-form equivalent, so email is the public route to your officials. If a phone number genuinely needs to be public — for a match-day contact, for example — publish a club number rather than a personal mobile. Routing contact through the form has a further benefit: published addresses get harvested by spam bots, and the form doesn't expose anything for them to scrape.

What happened to officials already set up? We have applied this to existing records as well. Any temporary member currently listed as an official on your site has had their email, mobile and landline set to hidden. You do not need to do anything, and no contact details have been deleted — they remain on the record and are still visible to you as an admin. If one of your officials' email addresses was displayed on your site before this date and now shows a "Send Email" button instead, this change is the reason, and messages will continue to reach them.

Why we've made this change: Play-Cricket sites are public, and anything published on them can be seen, copied and indexed by anyone. We think the person whose phone number or email address it is should be the one who decides whether it's published. For registered users, that's exactly how it works — they hold the setting themselves and can change it whenever they like. Temporary members have no account, so no way to see that decision being made or to change it. Contact forms give us a way to have both: the public can always reach your officials, and nobody's personal contact details are published without their say-so. That's the right default for volunteers who give up their time to run the game, and it brings Play-Cricket into line with how the rest of the web now handles personal data.

What you can still do? Registered users are unaffected. If your official has a Play-Cricket account, the hide/show controls work exactly as before. Where the person has chosen to hide their own details, you'll continue to see "Hidden by user" and won't be able to override it. Keep recording the details. Enter the email, mobile and landline as normal — they stay on the official's record for admin use, and the email is what enables the public contact form.

If you want an official's email address displayed in full: Ask them to register for a Play-Cricket account and link it to their official record on your site. Once they are a registered user, they can choose for themselves whether their contact details are displayed, and you'll be able to manage the setting with them. Many clubs find a generic club contact works better anyway — a role-based address such as secretary@yourclub.co.uk, or the club's main number. It survives a change of committee, so you're not editing your site every time a role changes hands.

Frequently asked questions: 

Will people still be able to contact our officials? Yes. Where an email address is recorded, visitors see a "Send Email" button and their message goes straight to the official through Play-Cricket. Check your officials have an email on their record so the button appears. 

Have the contact details been deleted? No. Nothing has been removed. The details are still stored against the official and visible to site admins — they are only hidden from public view. 

Does the official need a Play-Cricket account to receive contact-form messages? No. Messages go to whatever email address is recorded against the official, account or no account. 

Can I request an exception for a particular official? No. The setting is now fixed for non-registered officials across all sites. The route to displaying an individual's address in full is for that individual to register and choose to publish it. 

One of our officials wants their number shown. What do I tell them? Ask them to create a Play-Cricket account and let you know, so you can link their account to the official record. They can then set their own visibility preferences. 

Will this affect anything other than officials? No. This change applies only to the Officials section of site admin.

Need help? If you have a question about this change, please contact the Play-Cricket helpdesk here.