Post-Merger Notes

[James Gryphon]

The administrative part of the merger is basically done. Now that the celebration is underway, I thought it would be appropriate to mention some of the details involved in the transition and clear up some questions that you might have.

Due to the limitations of the tool that we used, some details have not been transferred over. Going strictly from memory, this includes information in your profile's special fields (about, quotes, etc.), all Mentions, all Thanks, and all Tags. The Loamhedge forum is still open, however, so that you can transfer these over as you feel is appropriate.

Loamhedge-era mention links that are here are bugged. Clicking on them will reroute you to the member with the same ID on the RACF, not to the member whose name is on the mention.

Polls that were on Loamhedge have been messed up; not only are none of the users' names displayed on the polls now, but each vote is listed thrice, creating a first impression that three times as many people voted as actually did.

The order of some posts in topics is bugged, when those threads existed at the same time (on both the LAF and the RAF, during the brief time it was back up after it first went down).

We have no immediate plans to fix these bugs. I just felt it was worth mentioning so that people didn't get confused, or think that the merger moved literally everything when in fact there were gaps in what we could cover.



If you had an account on the RAF before the merger, your Loamhedge user information has been merged into that, without changing the username. So, if you had a name you liked on Loamhedge, you will need to contact us to get us to change it now. For what it's worth I expect we will approve such changes in relatively short order.



Now that the merger is done, we have two sets of award badges. It is worth noting here that Leatho Shellhound's set is still valid and can be used on this forum. If a member is eligible for an award, they may choose either BrookSkimmer's or Leatho Shellhound's badges to represent that on their profile. I would note, however, that I would rather you not use both; they are beautiful, but this creates the impression to the uninitiated that someone has two awards. If you're having trouble deciding which badges to use, I would recommend that those who received an award on the RAF before it went down use BrookSkimmer's badge for it, and that those who received one on the LAF or RACF use Leatho's, but this is up to each individual user and you are in no way bound to follow my suggestion in this.



If you have any other questions or thoughts on things, feel free to mention them at our questions thread, or in PMs to our staff members. Thanks for contributing to the community and for your patience during this process.

[Lutra]

James, only asking publicly because I'm sure some may have the same question regarding this:

If you had an account on the RAF before the merger, your Loamhedge user information has been merged into that, without changing the username. So, if you had a name you liked on Loamhedge, you will need to contact us to get us to change it now. For what it's worth I expect we will approve such changes in relatively short order.

This doesn't make a lot of sense.  Fortunately, I'm Lutra here, and was Lutra on Loamhedge.  How do you combine two accounts?  Luckily nobody else tried to impersonate me, but I would think that would cause a lot of trouble if you didn't register with the same name.  I would think it would cause less trouble for the admins to simply manually change things like post counts to be added together than hope for the system to do it for you (especially if it goes awry).

Just food for thought.

[James Gryphon]

With the Admin Toolbox mod we had available, the user merger process was made as simple as it could be; it simply associates the information from one user ID (not usernames) with another, and we went through a list checking both user accounts and feeding their IDs into the tool. We did manually check to make sure that nobody was being impersonated, but other than that the process was quite streamlined. Doing all of the account mergers manually would have taken much, much longer, and been probably more error-prone given my limited experience doing that kind of work versus the testing process that the mod we used would have gone through.

That said, if the usernames were not identical, there is a chance that we didn't see your account needed merging, and haven't done so yet. I know this is true for Bonaparte (Blaggut), for instance. I hope this will be smoothed out with time. If anyone else has unmerged accounts, I encourage them to contact me ASAP so that we can get that resolved.