Your immediate problem has been addressed and you've received a tip to improve your code within the narrow context of the code you've shown. However there are some 'bigger picture' items that should be mentioned.

First off, Perl has some really wizard stuff for handling arrays. grep and push turn the whole sub into:

sub AddToUserArray {
    my ($UserID) = @_; # Like this because it scales well for many par
+ams

    # return 1 to skip addtouserlog ()

    # return if bad UserID
    return 1 if $UserID eq "";

    # return if handled user already
    return 1 if grep {$_ eq $UserID} @Participants;

    push @Participants, $UserID;
    return; # Generally better to return undef than 0
}
[download]

Note the last return which returns undef. Perl subs can return either a list or scalar value depending on calling context. undef works for most purposes in both contexts, but 0 becomes a 1 element list in list context and that can sometimes be surprising.

However, where you need to look stuff up arrays are often a bad choice. In Perl the better choice is to use a hash. The following code provides some assumed context for the sub to demonstrate how that goes:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %Participants;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    
    my ($name, $tail) = split / /, $_, 2;
    
    next if ! defined ($name) || exists $Participants{$name};
    $Participants{$name} = $tail;
    print "Added $name: $tail\n";
}

__DATA__
Fred Red team
Joe Blue Team
Pete Blue Team
Fred Red Team
Annie Red Team
Lee Green Team
Steve Green Team
[download]

Note that the whole sub has been replaced by just two lines:

    next if ! defined ($name) || exists $Participants{$name};
    $Participants{$name} = $tail;
[download]

The more important, and less obvious advantage, is that exists works in pretty much constant (and very short) time - no more looking through the entire array each time you need to see if an entry is there already. For even modest numbers of entries that is an overwhelming factor!

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