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My account was not merged.
Closed, ResolvedPublicBUG REPORT

Description

My account appears ununified (not attached in the screenshoot) which prevents me from acquiring some global permissions such as Global IP block exemptions etc. It can be seen in Special:CA:

Screenshot 2025-08-25 at 8.19.34 AM.png (1×1 px, 440 KB)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Wilfredor

Event Timeline

Could you try unifying it your self by visiting https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MergeAccount?

No, I can't, its a automatic process, and It not worked. The accounts remain ununified

It apparently has been like this since the rename of your account in 2019. Some discussion from the time is here: T215107#4984097. @Tgr says there that "this is more of a display bug", so hopefully no data is (too badly) corrupted, and we can do something to handle this situation better.

not attached in Special:CentralAuth means the localuser.lu_attached_method is null (maybe the code assumed there would be a left join?). But nothing actually looks at lu_attached_method AFAIK, as long as the row is present at all, the account is treated as attached.

From reading the other task, it looks like this was caused by a bug in fixStuckGlobalRename.php that was fixed in 2019 by https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/CentralAuth/+/493087.

There are only 520 rows, and 22 users, affected by this problem:

mysql:research@s7-analytics-replica.eqiad.wmnet [centralauth]> select count(*) from localuser where lu_attached_method is null;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|      520 |
+----------+
1 row in set (4 min 38.733 sec)
mysql:research@s7-analytics-replica.eqiad.wmnet [centralauth]> select lu_name, count(*) from localuser where lu_attached_method is null group by 1;
+-----------------------------+----------+
| lu_name                     | count(*) |
+-----------------------------+----------+
| 688GlRv                     |        1 |
| Bilonio                     |       19 |
| Bnhassin                    |       14 |
| CGminded                    |        2 |
| Deadnretireddd              |        2 |
| Fluorest                    |       10 |
| FormalErrors                |        1 |
| HotWC3                      |        1 |
| Hüseynzadə                  |       58 |
| Larry Hockett               |       61 |
| Nicolas Baptista            |        3 |
| Pixelight                   |        7 |
| RodrigoTavares              |       19 |
| Roquetero                   |        8 |
| StevenSmith83473            |        2 |
| TKD at World Para Taekwondo |        2 |
| Tzveti1                     |        1 |
| Vanished User cdJHGweI3s    |       59 |
| Wilfredor                   |      228 |
| Ya1levy777                  |        4 |
| ZenasGao                    |        5 |
| אבי גדור                    |       13 |
+-----------------------------+----------+
22 rows in set (7 min 6.674 sec)

I think we should fix it by just running a database query to fill in the attachment method:

update localuser 
set lu_attached_method='admin' 
where lu_attached_method is null 
and lu_name in ('688GlRv', 'Bilonio', 'Bnhassin', 'CGminded', 'Deadnretireddd', 'Fluorest', 'FormalErrors', 'HotWC3', 'Hüseynzadə', 'Larry Hockett', 'Nicolas Baptista', 'Pixelight', 'RodrigoTavares', 'Roquetero', 'StevenSmith83473', 'TKD at World Para Taekwondo', 'Tzveti1', 'Vanished User cdJHGweI3s', 'Wilfredor', 'Ya1levy777', 'ZenasGao', 'אבי גדור');

(the lu_name condition is necessary to use an index and make this query fast)

My account appears ununified (not attached in the screenshoot) which prevents me from acquiring some global permissions such as Global IP block exemptions etc.

@Wilfredor Can you clarify whether you're referring to a software problem here (i.e. it is impossible to grant permissions to your account, because you get an error), or whether your request for permissions was denied by someone because your account looks weird? As far as we can tell, this weird state should not result in any software problems, so this shouldn't prevent any permissions from being granted. Either way though, we'll probably fix it next week.

My account appears ununified (not attached in the screenshoot) which prevents me from acquiring some global permissions such as Global IP block exemptions etc.

@Wilfredor Can you clarify whether you're referring to a software problem here (i.e. it is impossible to grant permissions to your account, because you get an error), or whether your request for permissions was denied by someone because your account looks weird? As far as we can tell, this weird state should not result in any software problems, so this shouldn't prevent any permissions from being granted. Either way though, we'll probably fix it next week.

I didn’t try the manual unification because I had already attempted it before and it didn’t work, the accounts still remain ununified in CentralAuth. I’m waiting for this bug to be fixed so that I can request the Global IP block exemption

BTW: I spoke with @Ikan who experienced a similar issue:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392873

matmarex added a project: DBA.

Amir says he can run the query from T402786#11133419.

Ladsgroup moved this task from Triage to Done on the DBA board.
wikiadmin2023@10.64.0.174(centralauth)> update localuser 
    -> set lu_attached_method='admin' 
    -> where lu_attached_method is null 
    -> and lu_name in ('688GlRv', 'Bilonio', 'Bnhassin', 'CGminded', 'Deadnretireddd', 'Fluorest', 'FormalErrors', 'HotWC3', 'Hüseynzadə', 'Larry Hockett', 'Nicolas Baptista', 'Pixelight', 'RodrigoTavares', 'Roquetero', 'StevenSmith83473', 'TKD at World Para Taekwondo', 'Tzveti1', 'Vanished User cdJHGweI3s', 'Wilfredor', 'Ya1levy777', 'ZenasGao', 'אבי גדור');
Query OK, 520 rows affected (0.106 sec)
Rows matched: 520  Changed: 520  Warnings: 0

Looks like it's done: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth?target=Wilfredor

thanks for fixing this so fast, i can now proceed with my request for the Global IP block exemption, thanks guys

image.png (412×1 px, 180 KB)
the message should be "merged by developers", it's a joke

Change #1187078 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Bartosz Dziewoński):

[mediawiki/extensions/CentralAuth@master] Improve label for "admin" account merge method

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1187078

Change #1187078 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/CentralAuth@master] Improve label for "admin" account merge method

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1187078