Merge community accounts

Emil - I hope you didn't spend too much time looking honestly, because there is no option or process, currently defined**, to merge accounts.  😉 And...fwiw, I'm glad you reached out here; good ideas should see the light of day.

We have never specified a permanent account-merge feature because of the combination of complexity involved and need - not many have asked for, or defined a clear need for, such a feature. 

In your case - what are you thinking about? Or what problem are you having/foreseeing that would lead you to want to merge your accounts?

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**There was a short span (about 2+ years) where we maintained a merge function but that was due to a data migration choice we made when we upgraded our platform in 2019. (pre-2019 accounts could be merged with post 2019 accounts for the next 30+ months).

Hello LiefZimmerman,

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

In my case the idea is that I have a devcentral/community/partner account with my company email. I do not want to loose the saved forum/discussion subscriptions/replies and badges when I no longer have access to my corporate email (in the event I change jobs for example). I think it is a good idea for community members to keep their community history in case email needs to be changed. I also do not see an option to change the email address or add a secondary.

Kind regards,

K.

Ahh yes - I understand.

Some backstory:
Our SSO system, which now serves several external properties (including DevCentral), is still in transition away from using Email as UID. Historically, non SSO implementations found it easy to use email addresses as uniquely identifying a registrant. Many of our web sites were started, independently, many years ago (DevCentral will be 20 next year).

While we recognize email should NOT be a key field - until we can organize the migration for several of our sites togethr - it remains so.

So, that is why we can't let Community members change their email address (yet). We need to protect their account access for gated content on properties like Partner and Support from any innocent actions they may want to take for less-gated content such as you find in Community.

Now, Practically Speaking...and focusing on Community.
In your case - If you happen to change your corporate relationship with F5, where you may have a community account with community history (content, rank, etc) which you would like to maintain; in this case the DevCentral team can facilitate a change FROM your corporate linked email TO a linked personal email address on that same account. It will be easier for all of us to manage this if you can do that before you end your relationship with your company - but it is not mandatory.

What we still CANNOT do is accomodate a proper merge between 2 separate Accounts (e.g., pre-existing corp and personal) with different relationships to content from each.
By way of example, this means that IF you have already have a personal Community account AND a separate corporate community account we only have one, incomplete, option - to enable co-contributor for any CodeShare or Community Articles you may have written. This would enable PersonalAccount to maintain CorporateAccounts articles. Forum posts, however, must stay with the originating account. You could, of course, always comment on those posts to put them in your "notification" list. If there are a ton of them; that could get pretty arduous.

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That got long, my apologies; but I hope it's clear that this issue is important to me, and I am in touch with our SSO team to adjust some of this behavior. We have aims to increase your flexibility on community without risking the 'security' of your Partner, Support, or other necessarily gated accounts.

Increase Visibility on this Suggestion
One thing that would help elevate that conversation is a lot of Kudos, or further detail, alternate use-cases, etc on this suggestion. If you have friends on DevCentral with the same issues - have them kudo or comment on this Suggestion. I'll leave it open for a while as "Needs Info" - for that purpose and update ya'll here if/when things progress.

How would we contact the DevCentral team to change FROM our corporate linked email TO a linked personal email address?

Couple of places have this info:

A link "Contact Us" on our homepage in the right nav, guides the basics; This direct link will be current with whatever means we employ for direct contact at the time you decide to contact us: https://community.f5.com/t5/devcentral-news/support-and-help-for-devcentral-and-offline-contact/ta-p/291959

The Help link at the top right, near your profile avatar, provides guidance on how to change this and other info: https://community.f5.com/t5/help/faqpage/title/how_change_pii

both will direct you to email us at DevCentralFeedback@f5.com

Emil - If you have two separate DevCentral accounts which you want to access please contact me directly (via PM) or send an email to DevCentralFeedback@f5.com.

That email link will prefill your email with a subject and some prompts to clarify/expedite your request.

Beyond specific requests like this, I don't think there is anything about this Suggestion that requires follow up - currently database schema rules preclude moving content from one author to another so a *proper merge* is impossible.

Therefore, I'm setting the suggestion to Declined. If I misread your request somehow, let me know.
Cheers,
Lief