open-humans
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Switching to avoid leading zeros in future memberID creations
Description
Previously memberIDs could be created with 0 in the front. Various programs for data processing drop the 0, and then re-using the project memberIDs back in the command line would cause various errors in pulling or processing the data. Immense headaches have ensued for project administrators and data users. This attempts to remove the leading zeros (although it doesn't solve existing memberIDs with leading zeros) from future projectmemberID creation.
Testing
Have not tested but used OpenAI Codex to validate the sanity of this potential solution.
Why not switch to strings then?
@abitrolly I would be happy with achieving the goal of removing the leading zeros in generate project memberID's with whatever way @madprime prefers. I wanted to generate a PR to get this initiative moving, since it's been bothering many project administrators for years.
@madprime please let me know if there's anything else we can do to help move forward this or related solutions. Thanks!
The code looks good; I'm curious if this implies a secondary step to re-assign user IDs that currently have leading zeroes? If so, this code helps limit the number of reassignments that will happen if we do take that step in the future so it's worth merging now.