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Judging by the identical IP-generated Gravatars, "Jeet" now has at least five "unregistered" accounts(that I've found):  1   2   3   4   5 
And going by syntax and topic, likely at least one proper account that s/he may not even be aware of anymore, given the "seen" date.

It seems like the system should be reconciling the unregistered ones at minimum, no? Or is it one of those things there just isn't an especially good solution for?

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  • I went ahead and merged in that specific case since you had them all conveniently linked.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jul 23, 2011 at 20:23

2 Answers 2

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Since we automatically create a cookie based account for every user when they ask or answer a question, this generally means the user is:

  • blocking cookies or deleting cookies at the end of every browsing session

  • using a different browser for each question/answer

  • using a different computer for each question/answer

In any case, removing cookies is a lifestyle choice, and not something we generally interfere with. It is perfectly legal and correct to ask and answer here as an anonymous user at any time...

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  • Ah, makes more sense now. I know posting anonymously is fine. Wasn't concerned with that, given this clearly isn't an anonymity situation. (Or Jeet's really bad at it *grin*) There's just been a string of related questions from that same person and I got curious why they didn't seem to get collated properly when I was looking into their history.
    – Su'
    Jul 23, 2011 at 20:39
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Or is it one of those things there just isn't an especially good solution for?

It seems like it would make good sense to enforce e-mail address uniqueness on new accounts, however, apparently OpenID uniqueness is all that's being enforced here.

I'm adding the "bug" tag to this question given that this appears to be generating some confusion for our users and a simple "would you like to reclaim the existing account for this e-mail address?" dialog would (hopefully) address the situation.

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  • email uniqueness is enforced for registered accounts, but not for unregistered ones.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jul 23, 2011 at 20:19
  • @Jeff Atwood - Ah, I see... clicking the "complete registration" link from the e-mail for the duplicate account I signed up with actually takes me back to my registered account. Good deal.
    – danlefree
    Jul 24, 2011 at 6:56

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