Participant Status: pending refund can have two conflicting meanings

Overview

With partial payments and partial refunds becoming mainstream in CiviCRM, I think it is time to reconsider the connection between contribution status and participant status. I think there are more than one aspects of this, but I will focus on 'pending refund'

Example use-cases

1. change the payment or price-set to make a partial refund necessary
2. cancel the participant to make a (partial) refund necessary

Current behaviour

Currently a participant status: Pending Refund defaults as a positive count. But there are two scenario's that can cause this participant status:

1. there is a contribution total that is higher than the total event fee amount
2. there has been a cancellation for the event and the fee is pending to be refunded

In scenario 1: The participant is still expected to attend the event In scenario 2: The participant will not attend the event

Proposed behaviour

I think it is becoming troublesome to relate the contribution status with the event status. The default is that 'Pending refund' counts positive towards attendance.

Two proposals could be a) to remove participant statuses connected with the contribution

• may cause other difficulties, might me the best in the long end

b) to add a new status and to differentiate between two types of pending refund scenarios:

• Pending refund (cancelled)
• Pending refund (attending)

First one would have count status 0, second one count status 1

Comments

Any thoughts on this one? Can I find agreement on this proposal?