Need some way to merge accounts without emailaddress or with only dead ones

I have an account (pterjan) associated with the address <email address hidden>. This address no longer works since the domain is no longer owned by mandrakesoft. When I login (I still have the password) I see :

The email address '<email address hidden>', which you're trying to use to login has not yet been validated to use in Launchpad. We sent an email to that address with instructions on how to confirm that it belongs to you. As soon as we have that confirmation you'll be able to log into Launchpad.

Could having the old password be enough to merge accounts ?

When we have an admin interface available, we need to merge "enver-altin" and "enver-altin-frontsite" into "ealtin"

One of the pre-conditions for users to merge accounts is that the "from account" (the one that's going to cease existing) can't have any email addresses. I think we should keep this for the admin interface, because if the "from account" has one or more dead email addresses, we don't want to move them to the other account.

If we do this, to merge any account with dead email addresses will require someone with write access to the production database to go there and delete these dead email addresses. IMO, deleting these emails manually is not a big deal, and on the other hand it'll make it harder to cause harm by merging wrong user accounts.

Guilherme Salgado wrote:

> One of the pre-conditions for users to merge accounts is that the "from
> account" (the one that's going to cease existing) can't have any email
> addresses. I think we should keep this for the admin interface, because
> if the "from account" has one or more dead email addresses, we don't
> want to move them to the other account.

I think the email addresses should just be moved over, either flagged as NEW
or OLD. Probably NEW for now, as I don't think users have a way of
reactivating OLD email addresses yet (?).

Alternatively, they could just be deleted.

> If we do this, to merge any account with dead email addresses will
> require someone with write access to the production database to go there
> and delete these dead email addresses. IMO, deleting these emails
> manually is not a big deal, and on the other hand it'll make it harder
> to cause harm by merging wrong user accounts.

In almost every case where we need to use this feature, this manual step
would need to be taken. I don't see any point keeping it manual when it
would be trivial to handle it automatically.

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden> http://www.canonical.com/
Canonical Ltd. http://www.ubuntu.com/

> > One of the pre-conditions for users to merge accounts is that the "from
> > account" (the one that's going to cease existing) can't have any email
> > addresses. I think we should keep this for the admin interface, because
> > if the "from account" has one or more dead email addresses, we don't
> > want to move them to the other account.
>
> I think the email addresses should just be moved over, either flagged as NEW
> or OLD. Probably NEW for now, as I don't think users have a way of
> reactivating OLD email addresses yet (?).
>

Yes, they don't have a way to reactivate an OLD email address yet.

> Alternatively, they could just be deleted.
>
> > If we do this, to merge any account with dead email addresses will
> > require someone with write access to the production database to go there
> > and delete these dead email addresses. IMO, deleting these emails
> > manually is not a big deal, and on the other hand it'll make it harder
> > to cause harm by merging wrong user accounts.
>
> In almost every case where we need to use this feature, this manual step
> would need to be taken. I don't see any point keeping it manual when it
> would be trivial to handle it automatically.

Indeed it's trivial to handle automatically, I suggested that because the
merge of user accounts might be quite harmful if, let's say, a launchpad admin
inadvertently merge the wrong account. If they had to manually delete the
email addresses, they'd have another chance to realize that's the wrong
account. This is not ideal, obviously, but I think that if we're going to
provide a web interface for an operation that is not easily reversible
(or maybe it is?), we need some extra care to make sure we won't ever need
to revert one.

Guilherme Salgado wrote:

>>In almost every case where we need to use this feature, this manual step
>>would need to be taken. I don't see any point keeping it manual when it
>>would be trivial to handle it automatically.
>
>
> Indeed it's trivial to handle automatically, I suggested that because the
> merge of user accounts might be quite harmful if, let's say, a launchpad admin
> inadvertently merge the wrong account. If they had to manually delete the
> email addresses, they'd have another chance to realize that's the wrong
> account. This is not ideal, obviously, but I think that if we're going to
> provide a web interface for an operation that is not easily reversible
> (or maybe it is?), we need some extra care to make sure we won't ever need
> to revert one.

The paranoia check can be done with an 'are you sure?' page, listing the
details of the account that is going to be removed. This will be more useful
than requiring admins to manually delete the email addresses first using the
web UI, or asking the DBA to do it, as you are explicitly being stopped and
asked to confirm a dangerous operation. Any manual steps involved will also
be dangerous, and I think would only serve to make the process more
complicated, error prone and increase the likelyhood of a bad request going
through because confirmation didn't happen or happened too late in a
multistep process.

We can require an explicit, changing key to be entered on the confirmation
page to ensure it isn't just clicked through (which will be annoying, but we
don't do this very often so I expect the benefits will outweigh the annoyance).

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden> http://www.canonical.com/
Canonical Ltd. http://www.ubuntu.com/

Another reason to move the email addresses across, flagged as NEW or OLD, is
that we use them as a key for automatic account creation. If one of these
email addresses is sucked in by Gina or a similar system, an account will
again be created with the bad email address.

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/

On bug 29177, Matthew East said he wanted to merge two teams. AFAIK, this is the first time we get such a request, and I don't expect they to happen very often, so it might be a good idea to allow it only on this admin interface.

Is there any problems on merging teams that I don't know about? I know that at least the team owner is something we may have to special case, but there might be other things.

Guilherme Salgado wrote:

> On bug 29177, Matthew East said he wanted to merge two teams. AFAIK,
> this is the first time we get such a request, and I don't expect they to
> happen very often, so it might be a good idea to allow it only on this
> admin interface.
>
> Is there any problems on merging teams that I don't know about? I know
> that at least the team owner is something we may have to special case,
> but there might be other things.

A team merge would work just like a person merge except that the
TeamParticipation and TeamMembership tables will need to be handled
differently. Probably best to update these two tables first and then fall
through to the existing person merge code.

We shouldn't handle conflicts on the actual team meta data like owner,
description etc. - this can all be fixed up manually after the merge rather
than complicating the system with attempts to guess.

--
Stuart Bishop <email address hidden> http://www.canonical.com/
Canonical Ltd. http://www.ubuntu.com/

The documentation on merging duplicate accounts is a bit confusing:

a. "Note: If you no longer have access to the duplicated account's email address, you may place a support request or contact the Launchpad users mailing list; Launchpad administrators will tend to your request."
Source: https://launchpad.net/people/+requestmerge

b. "If you no longer have access to an email address registered for your duplicate account, you can request a Launchpad administrator for assistance in merging your accounts."
Source: https://launchpad.net/faq

I find this conflicting as advice.
I contacted an admin with personal e-mail but did not get a reply.
I have no idea how to place a request to
https://launchpad.net/people/admins/
as there is no "+addticket" to either the admins group or individually a specific administrator.

I have now created a ticket for "launchpad", at
https://launchpad.net/products/launchpad/+ticket/465
If that is correct, please
a. make the documentation be the same in both locations above.
b. add a simple link to the page "https://launchpad.net/products/launchpad/+addticket"
suggesting to place as a Summary the text "Assistance needed to merge duplicate account".

I reported the above issue as bug 33888