Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
Incidentally, if anyone at Stack Overflow is looking for better use-cases for generative AI in their products, ChatGPT spotted every single one of these issues (plus one more that I don't think is really an issue, but I spent maybe 5-10 minutes on this, with only one iteration after my first attempt; I'm sure an actual project to develop this could do somewhat better than this)
They very likely need to specifically mention, when submitting the form, that their network profile is showing an account/profile that isn't theirs, though; staff need to know what problem they're trying to solve, which is not just merging accounts.
Upon further inspection, I see what you saw: the new profile is somehow attached to an 11-year-old network account. However, in that case, your advice is not sound: if their Math.SE profile is attached to an account that's not theirs, they should request that they be unmerged first, so that: 1) their account and possibly name will not be attached to content they did not write, and 2) the original account owner does not gain access to their profile.
@Joachim The company that operates the Stack Exchange network generally refers to itself as "Stack Overflow". See, e.g., financial reports from its parent company (referring to the company only as "Stack Overflow") or the terms of service (referring to "Stack Exchange, Inc. ('Stack Overflow', 'we' or 'us')").
It remained online but was definitely affected; at least some tooling was failing to load. I'm not sure if any writes were possible at all; I didn't try.
IMHO, a request for "suggestions for further sign-up optimization work we haven’t covered here" is indeed a discussion. (Also, the SO Meta room's feed failed to pick this up due to this tagging)
@RokeJulianLockhart it reduces the latency for edits that do get submitted, otherwise people would probably be waiting months at this point. It's not a great solution, but the alternative of allowing the queue to expand to thousands of entries (which would, almost certainly, happen) is worse. The capacity to review them does not presently exist, which is what needs to be addressed.
@ShadowWizard "Any impact would be unintended." and "If you encounter any issues using the Wayback Machine, I would recommend reporting it as a bug." both sound like pretty strong statements regarding the company's intent for the foreseeable future. Is your issue with the phrase "at this time" in the sentence before those two?
