I noticed, when viewing a question on the Literature site, that my username and profile is not correct.
Here is my profile on that site, and this is me pretty much everywhere else, that I know of.
Something is weird here:
- My profile "about" section is filled in and I have the Autobiographer badge. I certainly never manually filled in the about page there so clearly this account is connected to my main account as the profile text was filled in automatically. Yet, the username and avatar does not match.
- Also I have the association bonus there, so it definitely wasn't me logging in randomly, I must have been already logged in as myself network-wide when I created that account (assuming I created that account).
- The "private information" section in that user900 profile is completely blank (no full name, no email address), unlike all of my other profiles. Only the "about me" is really filled in.
Points 1 + 2 = there's no reason why the username or avatar should be different. Point 3 is a mystery.
Also I am quite sure it's connected to my account. When I log out of Literature it does log me out of the entire network. And when I log in to the network, that account on Literature shows up again.
What is going on here? Is this a bug? An accidental merge? Did I do something weird?
None of this makes any sense to me. There's no reason why I should have a profile with a generic username and gravatar on that site given the other observations.
Additional random data points:
- I use the same Google login for everything here. Just to be sure I reviewed account activity for my Google account. There are no security alerts, no unrecognized devices, and no suspicious logins or other activity.
- I do not use the mobile apps.
- I sometimes use the mobile site through my phone, but I checked my phone's browser history (which I have not cleared since January) and confirmed that I have never visited that site there.
- Looks like I haven't cleared my desktop browser history either, and I can at least verify that I did indeed create the account on March 1st, there is a visit to the join page and the first question I visited was Why doesn't James Joyce ever use quotation marks?, although it does not appear that I took any actions there.
- According to my browser history I edited my profile, or at least visited the edit page, on March 2 (via MSE) and March 4 (via SO). I would have applied the changes to all communities. According to Mithrandir the Literature site profile was updated on March 3, two days after it was created. Not sure if this is a red herring, but these events did all happen around the same time.
- Yesterday, I had an unregistered account on the UX site merged with mine (long story), it seemed to happen without a hitch, not sure if that's related.
user switched profile image to gravatar identicon
as an event on March 1st, just found out. And it recorded a change to the 'about me' on March 3rd.