730412 - Affiliates: Unable to change email address when using BrowserID

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Affiliates Graveyard :: affiliates.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[Chris More [:cmore]]

How to reproduce:

Create an account on Affiliates using BrowserID with a specific email address. Create a banner, put the banner on your websites, and generate X amount of downloads. In the future, you want to change your email address and also keep all of your previous leader board statistics and created banners.

Expected:

You can change your email address in Affiliates and have it be linked to BrowserID while also maintaining all of your personal and statistical information in Affiliates.

Actual:

There is no way to change your email address in Affiliates if you are using BrowserID since if you register a new email with BrowserID, you look like a completely new user in Affiliates. All of your data and personal information is gone. In some cases, this may be want you want to do, but other instances user may want to take their data with them to a new email address.

This will be a good question for the BrowserID team as Mozillians has the exact same issue. There may need to be a workflow built between applications and BrowserID so that sites can verify a new email address for an existing user using BrowserID.

Comment 1

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #0)
> There may need to be a workflow built between applications
> and BrowserID so that sites can verify a new email address for an existing
> user using BrowserID.

Agreed. We might need to come up with some technically feasible ideas and bounce them off UX (and vice versa).

There may be a number of edge cases that we should be mindful of. For example: (Possibly) merging user accounts in the event that:
- you use identity A, then gather some data
- you come back, thinking you used identity B and log in
- you notice you didn't
- so you go back to identity A and then want to change your address to B
- which could fail because B exists in the database.

Comment 2

[Osmose [:osmose, :mkelly]]

Just as an FYI, some changes to Persona that are set to land any day now will allow us to verify that a user owns an email address without logging them out of their current account, meaning we can add in a flow for users changing their email address.

The priority of that feature is still up in the air (probably won't land in the initial redesign), but at least it won't be impossible!

Comment 3

[Ben (:bensternthal)]

Affiliates is scheduled for end of life. This bug will not be resolved.