It is a burden for a few circumstances that keep coming up that take up too much time and brain space to figure out:
- we invite people to join using one address, creating a staged user account, but then they actually end up joining using another email address. Or we find they already had another account using a different email.
- we invite people with dormant accounts to come back, and instead of logging in with their existing account they create a new account with another email address
In these cases, we merge the accounts and then change the email address to the newer one that the people want to use. We use WordPress SSO and change the email address in WordPress, which then updates it in discourse. If the email address we want to change it to is already contained in the secondary email field in discourse for the user, then we have to delete it first otherwise this step fails silently.
We have also had cases of people coming to create a new account after we merged their user accounts, using the secondary email address. This does not work with our current SSO setup and fails silently.
So… there are some technical challenges to work out, and I’m not sure it’s a priority on your end and I know it’s a backburner priority on my end to improve how wordpress and discourse play with each other. I know I am also pushing the envelope in how staged users are intended to be used.
In the meantime I’d be happy if I could just disable the functionality. If it’s not possible, I will just get in the habit of also clearing the secondary email every time I merge users.