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This is a continuation of this problem I had earlier. I thought the problem was solved and it kind of was for some time. Today I logged into my SO account, after a break of 3 or 4 days, to find that the avatar (profile picture) has changed along with my user ID. This didn't affect all the communities that I'm on; it only affected StackOverflow and MetaSE with the rest (MoviesSE, PuzzlingSE, ...) still the same as before.

The problem I had before was a credentials-related problem: my logins somehow got messed up. My Google account failed to log me into SO, so I created another Google account so that I can use that as my primary login on all the SE communities so that they are joined together again. That worked. The accounts were joined together under the new login.

While a was doing the above, SO created a new account for that new login. I tried deleting that new account but failed as the Google account was now attached to my old SO account not the new one. I thought I'll just send a merge-the-accounts form and it will be fixed. That happened but the account that got deleted was my old one, not the newly created one. All the reputation points and privileges and badges got transferred to the new account (I'm getting tons of notifications about those as we speak).

The new problem is that my SO account ID has changed from 6647153 to 9867451. Using the old ID to visit my account page shows the 404 error page. I want my old ID back because I've used that ID elsewhere in links, CVs, ...

How can I get it back?

Also, another thing that I've noticed is that my StackExchange accounts list shows duplicates and wrong reputation points for other SE communities. Is that a bug?

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Unfortunately, no, you can't get the old ID back. You said you solved your previous problem with the account merge tool; when that is used, one ID is kept as the only one going forward, and the other one is gone forever. Typically, the staff and system try to make the lower ID the one that is preserved, but that's not guaranteed (could be due to a weird configuration bug with one of the accounts, for example).

I suppose you could plead for one of the SE devs to manually enter the DB and make changes, but the chances of that working are basically zero.

As for the duplicates in your network account list, that looks to me like a side effect of the merge (http://shouldiblamecaching.com/) that should resolve itself after a short time, since the duplicate rows point to the same profiles.

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    "Typically, the staff and system try to make the lower ID the one that is preserved, but that's not guaranteed." Isn't it, though? My understanding is that it should always be the case. If this guy was screwed by a bug (as indicated by his weird account state in the other post), it's not unreasonable to hope for a fix.
    – Jeremy
    Jun 8, 2018 at 20:08
  • Perhaps you're right.... Not sure if he's saying it should always be that way or if something enforces that it's always guaranteed to be that way. I could've sworn I've heard of cases where the wrong ID is saved. Didn't find any examples on my 20-second search though. Even if this is a bug, it doesn't mean it'll be easy to reverse that already very strange process.
    – SOLO
    Jun 11, 2018 at 12:59

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