Combine duplicate user accounts

How to handle when a user has two accounts that need to merge

Zack Schwartz avatar
Written by Zack Schwartz
Updated over a week ago

There are situations where an applicant or judge may have two or more user accounts by accident. Or perhaps your program is using SSO and someone has changed their email and created a second account. In either case the goal is to move submissions and judging assignments from the first account to the second.

Swap out account
The most common case is that a user started or completed submissions under one email address and then created a new email address. Now they want to use this new email address going forward, but the entries and account is still linked to the old one.

Search for the user's two accounts in the left side navigation Applicants > Search. Be sure to click "Include users without any applications"

Open both accounts in separate tabs.

The goal is to get the original account to use the new account's email address. In order to do this we need to set the newly created account's email address to something else entirely.

Therefore in this scenario, we want zack+new@getopenwater.com to get "deleted" and zack+old@getopenwater.com to change to zack+new@getopenwater.com.

Under zack+new account, I am going to change the email address to 'zack+new@getopenwater.com.deleted'

I then go into the 'zack+old' account and change it to 'zack+new'

If we refresh our list of users, you would see the accounts adjusted like so:

Ask your user to log out / log back in and they should be good to go.

Single Sign On

For those with Single Sign On enabled, you may need to perform additional step. Go into the External Data tab of each account and clear out the values in both fields and click Save.

Switching over existing applications to the "new" account

If the user has entries tied to the "deleted" account, you can change the ownership of those entries to be under the account with the new email address.

Reassigning judge entries to the "new" account

If there are judge assignments tied to the "deleted" account, you would first have to navigate to the program and add the "new" account as a judge to the round they're assigned to review. Once added as a judge to the round, you can reassign the entries from the "deleted" account to the "new" account. Then, the last step would be to remove the "deleted" account as a judge in that round.

For programs with multiple judging rounds, you want to make sure the "new" account is being used in each judging round.

Make sure any saved bulk assignments rules has the "new" account saved.

If you're using Judge Teams, check if the team has the "new" account associated with that specific team.

Note
You cannot actually delete accounts in OpenWater, but by adding '.deleted' to the end of an email address, you are essentially making the account inaccessible and is a good convention to follow.





Did this answer your question?