There are multiple use cases for such a feature:
- Authentication methods conflict resulting in a same person having 2 accounts, example:
(Which also happens to be a question around merging accounts).
- A community manager/ staff at community company leaving resulting in lost mentions and need to explain the situation to members example:
In both cases merging/ consolidating the activity of both users into one single account makes more sense then other options, enabling case 1 users not to loose any activity/ p[points/ contacts/ subscriptions etc… and in case 2 all community members have consistency and continuity on the platform and the current community manager to have no loss of information or explanations to make…
Finally perhaps less common but an interesting case for B2B companies:
- A person changes company and their SSO login tied to our App which requires the use of their professional email address, is therefore no longer valid and we need to be able to manually fix this as they’ve created a new account for themselves. We want our community to act as a career long partner and not being able to honour this would be disappointing!
Woah, you’re on fire Greg! I’m impressed! XD
Major usecase…. relieves us from Huge data cleanup projects.
Totally agree with you, there are some really good use cases that I also experienced multiple times in my life as a Community Manager. When colleagues are leaving and the community still mentions them, I might never notice it and miss out on what could be a valuable conversation...
I know that our recent improvement to create articles in another users’ name has been a milestone on our way to such a functionality - basically we needed to build a logic that allows other users to continue receiving notifications for / being displayed as the author of content that a user originally not has created. Having this dynamic in our platform is what enables us in the first place to allow us to even think about such a feature.
From what I remember from internal conversations, this is something that the product team also had already on their radar while developing. I don't think that there is a set roadmap item for this improvement in the next three months, but having this idea here will hopefully help to prioritize it accordingly!
Thanks for the context@Julian I have to say I am really enjoying the feeling of transparency the ideation product updates/ feedback provides on InSided. Makes me want to hear from a developer/ product manager perspective, what are the pros and cons of this transparent (at least partially) approach as opposed to a private feedback gathering and prioritisation.
Actually thats a great conversation if I can get some feedback, albeit just from InSided developers/ product managers!
Hi@SmartlyGreg , thanks for submitting this idea! The value of such a feature is unquestionable and there are lots of use cases that would benefit from such a functionality, especially for the community teams' effort put into cleaning and repurposing content but also the effect on the community members.
As Julian mentioned above, the functionality to merge users or transferring ownership of content associated with a user is on our radar, although without a specific timeframe yet. I’ll be following this idea and hope to give you an update on this later.
Regarding your latest comment, around the pros and cons of the transparent approach, the inSided product team learned from the inSpired community that regular and transparent communication builds trust with our customers and sharing the thinking behind accepting or rejecting an idea is received as valuable by customers. Having customers build on (or sometimes even challenge) each others’ ideas is something really valuable that we cannot replicate in a closed environment. Also, closing the loop publicly in our product updates and mentioning which ideas we delivered on, really emphasises that we value our customers’ ideas and are keen to deliver on those.
For the cons, it's quite tricky to handle timeframe estimation and not committing to delivering features as roadmaps are fluid, priorities changes and technical complexity can always arise. Probably over-communicating can be the antidote of the cons, but it is good to always be mindful of bringing the customer along the thinking path, while not creating expectations that are hard to match.
Big +1 from us :)
Hello all,
any news on merging users?
Another use case (SSO login): Even if a user does not change companies, user might get a new email on his/her company side (for different reasons), then registers with this new email (unbeknownst to community admins) and then exists twice.
Thanks!