User blog:MisterWoodhouse/Uniting the Fandom and Gamepedia login systems

Hey gang!

As many of you are aware, we have been working on unifying the login systems of Fandom and Gamepedia as part of the Unified Community Platform project.

I am happy to announce that this incredibly complex work is nearing completion (or already done, depending on when you read this)! One piece that needs to be called out, however, is the fact that we are having to overcome some username conflicts.

What is a username conflict and how many are there?
A username conflict is when an account on Fandom and an account on Gamepedia share the same username and, thus, cannot exist on the same system.

In our scanning, we found that there were over 15 MILLION similarities between accounts on the two platforms. Here’s a breakdown of that figure:


 * 708 full matches of username, email, and Twitch ID
 * 47,226 matches of username and email
 * 150 matches of username and Twitch ID
 * 80,450 matches of username
 * 596 matches of email and Twitch ID
 * 125 matches of just Twitch ID
 * 15,702,962 matches of just email

Yeah, that is a lot of matches that we found. Thankfully, the VAST majority of those conditions do not require any conflict resolution.

What is being done to resolve the conflicts?
For those of you who read my blogs, you’ll know that we did some outreach about folks who have Twitch ID matches on mismatched usernames. Those were matches we need to have users resolve manually.

For the 80,450* matches of username without a corresponding source of truth to prove an identity match, we engaged in some conflict resolution rules. I am going to outline these rules to explain how we determine which account keeps the username automatically.

An account keeps the username if the following applies (in order of application):


 * It has special global rights like Staff (or Hydra Staff), Wiki Manager, Content Team Member, VSTF, Community Council, Global Discussions Moderator, Helper, or GRASP
 * It has edits and the other account does not
 * It is on Gamepedia and the Fandom equivalent has been disabled or was renamed to something else
 * It is on Fandom and the Gamepedia equivalent has an identical registration date (indicates same account owner without another source of truth identifier)

Here is the breakdown of how the rules worked out:


 * 39,293 accounts on Gamepedia kept their usernames
 * 29,793 accounts on Fandom kept their usernames
 * 2,046 accounts were determined to be the same and merged
 * 9,319 conflicts remain

For those of you doing the math, you’ll notice it comes out to 80,451 instead of 80,450 and that’s because 80,450 refers to conflicts and 80,451 refers to a combination of accounts winning and remaining conflicts, so there was an evens versus odds moment. Just a fun bit of stat math.

We took the 9,319 remaining conflicts and applied further rules to determine additional winners:


 * If both accounts have fewer than 500 edits, the older of the two accounts keeps the username.
 * If only one account has over 500 edits, it keeps the username.
 * If both accounts are over 500 edits, but within 500 edits of each other, no winner is chosen automatically and we will manually mitigate.
 * If both accounts are over 500 edits, but NOT within 500 edits of each other, the account with more edits wins the username.

And here is how those rules panned out:


 * 2,680 accounts on Gamepedia kept their usernames
 * 6,362 accounts on Fandom kept their usernames
 * 192 conflicts were discovered to be the same registration
 * 85 conflicts remain to be resolved

Again, let’s do the math and see that 41,973 Gamepedia accounts kept their usernames (52.2% keep rate), while 36,155 Fandom accounts kept their usernames (44.9% keep rate). Pretty darn close to even when you consider the scale.

What happens to the accounts which don’t keep their usernames?
Accounts not keeping their usernames will have their usernames automatically changed to add -fduser or -gpuser as a suffix and will be eligible for a username change. The username change will NOT count against your single change allotment and you can get the change even if you have had one in the past.

What about legacy accounts on Gamepedia?
Legacy accounts on Gamepedia are accounts which exist on the wikis, but not in our login system. They are artifacts from wiki migrations. They will remain in the system and can be reclaimed, but if they have lost a username conflict, they will have a @legacy suffix to indicate legacy status in the meantime. This is done to preserve revision history.

Timing of the login system merge
Now that the conflicts have been resolved, we are able to merge the Gamepedia accounts into the Fandom login system, which means that we will be ELIMINATING the requirement to have a Twitch account in order to login on Gamepedia wikis!

During the migration process, new logins for Gamepedia will be disabled. You will not be able to register a new account and you will not be able to login. Existing login sessions will persist during the migration process, so login now and stay logged in to avoid disruption.

Once migration is complete, Gamepedia users will need to log back in with the Fandom login system. If you have a Fandom login which is being merged thanks to matching email or Twitch ID, just login using that and you are golden. If you do not have a Fandom login, use your Twitch account option and then you can elect to switch to normal Fandom login going forward.

The migration process should take a day or so and is scheduled to begin July 21st at 3pm US Eastern Time.

If you have questions about this, I’d be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. Individual questions about whether or not your account won a conflict will not be answered, however, due to the volume involved.

*at time of writing. At time of publication, this was 84,370 conflicts

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