Account merging bugs on hotcrp.com

[ndauten]

I keep getting added to PCs under old email: [email protected]

Trying to merge [email protected] with [email protected]

I get the following sequence of events:

1. Login to see ASPLOS 20 PC Acct

2. Merge Acct:

3. Apparently [email protected] doesn't exist

4. But it does:

On prior attempts, hotcrp said the merge was successful, but the conferences were not visible in the [email protected] account.

Not sure how to traverse the chasm here. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Cheer,

--Nathan

[kohler]

Hi Nathan,

Sorry about this bug. What's happening is that the [email protected] account really doesn't exist on the ASPLOS 2020 instance, because you have not done anything yet on that instance. (HotCRP.com harnesses a bunch of conference-specific installations to a shared user database.)

I've made a change; you could try the merge again? I also hear your underlying complaint that the per-site “merge account” model works poorly on HotCRP.com.

Eddie

[ndauten]

Hi Eddie-

No worries on the features and thank you so much for hacking on it so quickly.

That makes a lot of sense. I was unaware that they were separate "instances", DNS made me make silly assumptions. Okay, so I tried to merge again without doing anything special (ie. doing something on the ASPLOS 2020 with [email protected]), and the result was not what I expected. Then I thought and looked more closely, realizing I had once again made the assumption that the accounts would be merged completely, ie that [email protected] would be gone and all of the existing instances would merge over. After realizing that the merge is per site, I did a quick test on another conference from the old to the new and it merged (transferred) perfectly!

To be honest the merge model is perfectly fine. It's more of these boneheaded operators who don't realize the great fine-granularity that you've provided for us. The new change is very welcome, it might also be helpful to change the wording indicating that the merge is more like a transfer from one account to the next for the currently active site.

I really appreciate your effort.

Nathan

[fdouglis]

@kohler ,

I encountered a related bug today. I was added to a paper, which created an account under a different address. Once I got into it, I asked to merge. It defaulted to moving my old address under this one, but I asked to do the opposite. It did keep the original account as far as I can tell, but it sent mail saying that I should now log into the newly created one.

[fdouglis]

Oh, I take it back! While it shows me the paper info when logged in under my gmail address, it won't let me edit it unless I log in. That shouldn't be necessary.

[fdouglis]

One more bit of info on this. I went back and saw that despite my merge request, I still had both a gmail and corporate hotcrp account. So, I tried the same thing a 2nd time. This time it correctly said it merged into gmail, but even still, when logged into the gmail account, it doesn't let me edit the paper originally associated with my corporate email.