Merge users - core feature vs plugin

Hi, this is not really a support topic, more of something I’ve stumbled upon:

We had this situation where we needed to merge two users where the one being merged and deleted afterwards had more than 4500 posts.

Using core functionality we’ve got an error message after some minute into the merging, a bit like a timeout (can’t recall exactly what what written there) and the process seemed to have died there.

After a while we’ve tried using the old Merge plugin (Merge Users Plugin) and it seems to have worked flawlessly. The process ran in the background for several minutes/hours? and after that we received a system message stating that the merge was successfully completed.

What would be interesting to know is if the core functionality also works/progresses as a background task like the old Merge plugin despite the timeout. If so, it means we shouldn’t need to use the plugin at all.

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This is something we are currently discussing, so it could be added soon or not. Watch #feature:announcements for details.

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@sam we should probably pop a warning here if someone attempts to merge users with a bazillion posts. Otherwise it is a support topic generation machine

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Agree we should do something, a warning is a bit odd though. “This is probably going to break, but feel free to click anyway” … I can see that leading to even more support.

I will just add this to the next release so we move the work to a background job or make it work in batches and show progress which is the ideal outcome.

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