I want to merge two accounts but have same email and pword for both so can't provide profile links for both to log in!

Question

Here what I had prepared for the merge support guys...

I have two accounts with the same email [email protected] and I want to merge them together. This came about as a result of the fact that I found it infuriatingly difficult to log in. I think this was a result of the log in page not being rendered correctly in firefox when I went to log in on firefox the page wasn't displaying the text boxes correctly so I went to chrome and ended up creating a new user account. Anyway the two names of the accounts are "bingbong" and "userxxxxx"

I would like to merge these I would like to keep "userxxxxx" as the primary account and I will take it from there. Is there a recommended browser for stack exchange? Once I have created my account with stack exchange do I need to create new accounts for each sub section of stack exchange? or do I automatically get access to each by which I mean I can ask/answer questions in each? I can't log in to my other account bingbong to provide you with the bingbong profile link because (and this is the annoying not very intuitive part, or am I a bit slow!?) the details you use to log in are your email address (shared by both accounts) and password which I have set the same for both accounts, so it just keeps logging me in to userxxxxx. You should implement some preventative measure to stop people creating accounts with the same email and password? Am I right in saying this?

So you can see my problem I can't log in to bing bong cos I it has the same credentials as userxxxx I am guessing I'd need to close userxxxxx account for me to be able to log in to bingbong? Thereby rendering the while exercise useless as userxxxxx is the account I want to keep

Answer 1

Oookay... you have a lot of questions here. Let me take them one at a time:

Is there a recommended browser for stack exchange?

See this question: Which browsers are officially supported, and what else do I need?

Once I have created my acc with stack exchange do I need to create new accounts for each sub section of stack exchange? or do I automatically get access to each by which I mean I can ask/answer questions in each?

I'm guessing by "sub section" you mean "site"? (Stack Exchange is a network consisting of more than 100 separate Q&A websites.) Yes, you need to create new accounts on each site, in the sense that if you are signed up on Information Security, that doesn't let you post on Computer Science¹; you would need to create an account on Computer Science for that.

But these accounts on individual Stack Exchange sites (InfoSec, CS, etc.) don't handle logging in. You put your username and password into a separate website, which could be stackexchange.com, Google, Yahoo, or others, and that website logs you into your account at InfoSec or CS or whatever. That separate website is called an OpenID provider, because it takes your username and password and provides you with an OpenID, a special code that gets you logged into a Stack Exchange site.²

I can't log in to my other account bingbong to provide you with the bingbong profile link

You don't actually need to log in to get the profile link, if you can find a post you made from the other account. Or if you remember the username, try searching on the user list: from any page, look at the top bar next to "Questions", "Tags", "Users" <- click on that one.

because (and this is the annoying not very intuitive part, or am I a bit slow!?) the details you use to log in are your email address (shared by both accounts) and password which I have set the same for both accounts, so it just keeps logging me in to userxxxxx.

Actually, the detail you use to log in is your OpenID. It's impossible to have two accounts associated with the same OpenID; clearly, somehow you've used two different OpenIDs to log into your favorite SE site. The two different OpenIDs could be from different providers (for example, one from Google and one from stackexchange.com), which might have the same email address, or they could be two different OpenIDs at the same provider, which would probably have different email addresses. (It's possible an OpenID provider could let you make two OpenIDs with the same email, but the most common ones don't.) I can't tell from your question which case applies to you.

Either way, you can log into the old account if you can figure out which OpenID goes with it. I realize that's not so easy, but I'm not sure what else to tell you. Maybe a moderator on your site can help you out.

You should implement some preventitive measure to stop people creating accounts wuith the same email and password? Am I right in saying this?

Some people have legitimate reasons to have multiple accounts, and it's sometimes easier for them to use the same email address for all of them. In fact you don't even need an email address to make an account at all, if I remember correctly. All you need is an OpenID. So I don't think this would be practical.

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¹you can post as an unregistered user on CS but I'm ignoring that possibility
²not really accurate, I know, but it makes the point