UI for merging accounts is unintuitive

[Karl Fogel]

[Note this bug was accidentally filed under Ubuntu originally; it's invalid there, and is really a bug in the 'launchpad' project.]

The UI for merging a user account Y into account X is backwards:

  1. Log in as user X (the account you're trying to keep)
  2. Click on username in upper right to go to https://launchpad.net/~X
  3. Now you're on the Profile page; click "Change Details", bringing you to https://edge.launchpad.net/~X/+edit
  4. Scroll down to "Never going to use Launchpad again? Deactivate your account."
  5. Even though this is the account you want to *keep*, click "Deactivet your account."
  6. Ignore most of the UI on the resultant page, and look down to "If you have multiple accounts, you should merge them instead!"
  7. Click on "merge them instead", taking you to https://edge.launchpad.net/people/+requestmerge
  8. Read the instructions, do the needful.

So the problem is mainly that https://edge.launchpad.net/people/+requestmerge is too hard to find. The only path I know for finding it involves stepping through a dangerous minefield labeled "deactivate your account" when that's precisely what you're trying not to do.

Proposed solution:

On the Edit Profile page (https://edge.launchpad.net/~kfogel/+edit), at the bottom under "Other Actions", add a new action entitled "Merge another account into this one", which would link to https://edge.launchpad.net/people/+requestmerge.

While this wouldn't be perfect, since "Change Details" is still an odd way to reach a merging action, it would at least be a big improvement over expecting the user to click "deactivate" on the account they want to keep.

Note: this is not really the same as bug #165148, but someone looking at that bug might also want to look at this one at the same time.