New Feature: Account Merge Tool
We’ve created a new video outlining how to merge Spokt member accounts using our new Account Merge tool. Please watch the video below, and carefully follow the directions. An account merge, once performed, cannot be undone.
If you currently have 2 or more Spokt member accounts (all for the same member/name) and would like to merge them into one account, you can use the tool illustrated in this video. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comment section below.
Thanks!
RJ, We have the problem of multiple entries for the same person on the same Hub. This is probably because for some reason they had two entries on My Family. Most of these people have not yet signed into Spokt but I have a couple who have an “active” account but also one that has not been used. Can I just remove those dormant duplicates?
From FAQ (http://blog.spokt.com/general/mayflower-and-general-faq-recent-items/):
Q: I’m a Hub administrator, and I have duplicate members after importing our MyFamily site through Mayflower. Should I delete the extras?
Please DO NOT DELETE EXTRA accounts. We are working on a way for members to merge multiple accounts on Spokt, whether it be due to an import duplication (they had an account on your MyFamily site and your new Spokt hub, and were not matched correctly) or otherwise. Please look for new tools to help alleviate these situations in the coming week.
If you are sure they never accepted an invitation on MF or (if they did) never posted any content, then it would be up to you to decide whether or not you will delete them.
FYI, if you do delete them, we still show them as being the owner/creator of a post or comment, but they will no longer be able to edit this content despite it having their name attached to it. It will likely not be a major problem in most cases, though I would suggest that the member proceed to merge these accounts anyway, in case there was any content created by them on MyFamily.
When I watched the video I guess I thought this only applied to people who had accounts on two Hubs but now I see that it also applies to my situation – one Hub where the same user ended up with multiple accounts on My Family but the same email. As you say, most I’ve looked at had two different user names. But the same email. The problem I have is that many of my members are not computer savvy enough to follow the merge procedure so I would like as an admin to do it for them. Can I do that?
Hi Nancy,
It’s up to you to decide whether or not you’d like to merge accounts for your members. We currently do not have a policy for or against that. Our only policy is that the person initiating the account merge is the one responsible for any resulting, well, merging. 😉
My main advice would be to be sure you are only merging accounts that belong to the same distinct person (i.e. Bob Brown), and not two people sharing the same info at MyFamily (i.e. Bob Brown and Betty Brown, or Bob’s kids, etc).
I hope that helps Nancy. Thanks for the questions!
RJ
The site appears to be down. Support is also down, RJ please notify. Thanks
Same here
Thanks Syd. Should be all fixed now!
Hi Ron,
Sorry for the problem. One of our web nodes was hung up for a bit, affecting a small handful of members. We rebooted it and it seemed to come back online just fine for the remainder of the day. Thanks for the heads up!
RJ
Hmm I can get into our Hub and can do some things but not others. For example I can see All photos but if I choose one I can see some but not others. I can’t see News at all. Get Bad Gateway message.
Hi Nancy,
This was a temporary issue with one of the servers in our cluster. Should be all good now. Thank you!
I was unable to get into the hub for about an hour or so. RJ Thanks again for all you guys have done. I have came across a problem with a bunch of our posts saying they were posted by deleted member. Is there a way you guys could give the admins rights to make changes to submitters so we can correct this. Thanks in advance.
Hi Ron. We hope to add this functionality once things settle down a smidgen. We appreciate your patience as we work through the steady stream of refugees still needing migrations leading up to the final shutdown.
I see a couple of problems with the Merge Accounts function.
It states, “If you do not know the username/password for your secondary account, your Hub admin can supply it to you by viewing your profile.”
1) As an admin, how am I to find the user’s profile? If the hub only has 20-30 members, you can probably manage. But, our hub has over 3,000 members! And, when those members were ported from MyFamily to Spokt, most of our membership had a first name and a last name followed by the years they served, eg. John Smith (63-67). Mayflower decided to keep the first name, throw away the last name, and changed the last name to (63-67), so it’s nearly impossible to identify an account from the name alone.
2) How do I provide a user with his password? It’s not openly displayed in his profile, and for good reason.
I’m losing my membership rapidly – so many are still unable to log in, and I’m unable to help them. I’d appreciate any help.
Hello Dutch,
Thanks for your feedback and for your clear, concise explanation of your experience so far.
The vast majority of the sites we’ve seen so far have been migrated successfully, but we know there are a few where even the best we’ve had to offer isn’t good enough. I ask for your continued patience as we work to make the process smoother for you.
Your Hub is a bit of an anomaly, as it is one of the larger Hubs that Spokt provides. We are aware of the issues surrounding a large membership such as yours, and we are working hard to make things easier for you and your Members.
We have added the ability to resend invite emails, we’ve made the pagination on member lists linkable (so you don’t lose your place when going between profiles), and we’ve created a way for admins to reset passwords for members who have forgotten them.
I will personally escalate this to the engineering team to see if there are some additional steps we can take in the short term to help alleviate your situation. That said, I know the team is currently swamped tackling the 1.0 and 2.0 migrations with the fast approaching deadline.
Again, I appreciate your feedback and I appreciate your patience as we strive to make Spokt a comfortable place for your large group.
Thank you!
RJ
Ok guys, I am going to have to ask you to stop moving photo url addresses. I just had to change several in code to have our photos on the news articles. If you say you didn’t then explain why the url would be different when I had to copy and past the new url, which was absolutely different. Please don’t do that, broken link icon does not look good on any of my pages.
Hello Ron,
I’m not sure what you’re referring to, but we do not modify content in your Hub. The only thing I can think may be happening is the Mayflower tool is bringing in the inline (embedded) photos that were previously missing, as you were informed would happen when you performed your migration in the Mayflower Terms. These images are those that appear as images (not the “file” icons) alongside the text in posts and comments, similar to how videos and photos are embedded on this blog to show up inline with the text. Before they were imported, you would likely have seen a large black graphic with a description stating that it was a placeholder and that the content was being downloaded.
If this is not what you’re seeing, then please contact us through our contact form and we’ll dig deeper to see what might be happening.
Thanks!
RJ
I have a couple of issues with the Account Merge Tool. It states, “If you do not know the username/password for your secondary account, your Hub admin can supply it to you by viewing your profile.”
1) How do I find the profile for any given member? When Mayflower ported our membership across from MyFamily, it captured the first names OK, but most of our last names had years of tours served appended to them eg, “Jones (63-66)”. In this case, it would create a name like “Bob (63-66)”. If your membership is 40 or 50, that’s not too bad, but we have over 3,000 members, making it nearly impossible to find a members profile!
2) Even if I manage to find a member’s profile, how do I report his password back to him. It’s not displayed, and rightly so.
We’re losing a significant number of our membership because they’re frustrated and are giving up trying to get logged in. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Dutch,
We plan to improve our membership tools for hubs like yours with thousands of users but for now you’ll have to use the pagination to find these members.
Auto-generated passwords are displayed to hub admins on the user’s profile screen – once a user changes his or her password it will no longer be visible to anyone. If a user is having trouble logging in or forgot his or her password the hub admin can generate a new password for them. Users can also reset their own password by clicking the “Forgot Password” link on the log in screen.
What I was referring to was when I put a insert a photo in a news post via html, pointing it to the photo on your Spokt server. Sometimes when I go back to it I get a broken link icon. I’ve had this several times. When it happens I have to go back find the photo and reinsert the link, not fun if you have a lot. I do hope it works itself out. I’m still patient it will.
I have a question regarding the hub accounts that were created by Spokt as part of the Import process and trying to fix some duplicate accounts that resulted. If a Spokt-generated account has the wrong first name, I’m assuming that all of the posts associated with that member would also have the wrong name. Now, if we correct the name, do all of the posts associated with that member get updated information on the person who made the post?
And if we admins get the ability to do a merge for our users, how are the two accounts merged? That is, what information is used (if any) from the secondary account? Or do you simply associated all of the posts for the secondary account with the primary one and throw away the information that was in the secondary account?
Hi Bob,
All posts with names that have been matched to a Spokt user will be updated when you update the user’s name. Contact support if this gives you issues so we can correct it.
Currently users must merge their own superfluous accounts. All activity from the secondary account will appear as if it was done by the primary user. No profile information is merged.
Dan, I think I figured out the problem. When I grab a link to a photo it has a expiration limitation. Can we do something about this. Cause it get to be monotonous to have to change it often. The problem is when I insert a photo on a news item using HTML code with a link from the photo that was uploaded to Spokt, It keeps disappearing after so long. Please let me know a solution, and deleting is not an option. Thanks.
Hi Ron,
Please send these finding to support and we’ll see what we can do.
I have a 2.0 account and would like to bring it the SPOKT – I registered it tonight; but, it is not on my list of sites. How will I get it migrated? Thanks!
Hi Carolyn,
We’ll notify you as soon as your 2.0 sites are ready to order.
I have a merge question, but I’m not sure that this is the right place to ask. I just initiated a migration for a myfamily site that I want imported into a current hub of another site that was previously migrated. I was thinking that being that I did not create a new hub and I am a member and administrator on multiple hubs that at some point it would ask where I wanted the data to be migrated to, but it didn’t – what do I do now?
Thank you,
Rusty Weber
Hi Rusty,
First the data is exported, then the data is processed and reformatted, then that data is imported into a holding area. You will receive an email telling you that your migration is ready to finalize.
At this point you’ll select which site goes into which hub and match any Spokt users to myfamily.com users.
Nice work, Dan. I’d like to see a field for an e-mail address on the profile form, since that’s how most of my MyFamily family communicated outside of that site. An editable family tree at the hub would also be ideal. (I can dream, and so I do.) Thanks.
Hi Lisa, Look for the “Account” link near the top of the edit profile screen. You’ll see email address there.
I have migrated my own site into a new Spokt hub. It seems to be working all right, but I am not sure that the history files are there. At least, I have not yet found them.
My real question is about merging another site with this one. I have asked for the migration and it is ready to finalize. However, I now see that you are telling me that untangling problems with it will require a $30.00 fee. I need to know which is best to do, pay for the hub and then merge this or pay the $30.00 later if untangling is needed. Some of the posts above suggest code will be needed and deleting will cause problems. The membership is not too large, under 100 or perhaps under 50, and we had some of the same members. I was also an administrator of this site so doing so here should not be a problem if both are integrated into the same site. The original owner will also be involved as an administrator here. Please tell me what is best to do here.
I wrote support before asking for the migration, but I have had no response yet, and time was short and still is. Thanks.
Sandy,
My site was also migrated to Spokt. I found that the easiest way to check to see if History posts and File Cabinet posts etc are there is to go to your My Family site and print out the list of History posts and list of File Cabinet posts etc. then you can easily search for them in Spokt by the title of the post. I only spot checked these until I satisfied myself that they were there. Keeping the lists is also useful if you want to find things in the future until Spokt has implemented new organizational features.
I am noting finally that with search I find some of my history posts are thought were gone. When a files section is available will I be able to rename it perhaps and move them there if desired or some other tag useful enough to separate them.
I am noting finally that with search I find some of my history posts are thought were gone. When a files section is available will I be able to rename it perhaps and move them there if desired or some other tag useful enough to separate them.
I have no answer yet as to whether the added site, which I helped administer, is best just dropped into my present hub or if another hub now is best to do? The cost seems euqitable, but though posts, etc., overlap not many member do. Is that the real issue with doing it without first setting up a separate hub.
Hi Sandra,
It’s up to you! You can leave them separate or merge them. We do display a warning if you attempt to merge two sites into a single hub because some people do it accidentally but there is no problem if that is what you want to do.
I have the second site ready to finalize into the current hub I have. Is it best to put it first into a hub of its own, or to go ahead with putting it into my present hub? I need to know which will work best. We have items and a few members overlap in the two sites, best no extensive overlap really. Pleast tell me what to do since time is running short here. Thanks.
Otherwise, I am finding the hub I have is working well and I appreciate all you are doing. I look forward to the newere organizagtion upgrades being planned.
Hi Sandra,
It’s up to you! You can leave them separate or merge them. We do display a warning if you attempt to merge two sites into a single hub because some people do it accidentally but there is no problem if that is what you want to do.