How to Keep That Old Profile with That Big Legacy Reputation from Being Hidden by Default
Do you have an older profile for an account that is inactive, to which you no longer have access? Maybe you changed companies and had to start a new account with the new company, or maybe you don’t have access anymore to the email that the old account was tied to.
If you were a regular contributor (or heck, even an occasional contributor) on SAP Community, or its predecessors SCN or SDN, you may have accumulated a nice body of blogs and answers, as well as a reputation of points, level, and badges in our legacy reputation system. Here, for example, is the current profile and reputation of SAP Mentor Paul Hardy:
And here is the legacy reputation accumulated by Paul in a previous profile:
While Paul has been active with his current profile and has content and reputation in it, he would certainly want SAP Community members to know that that profile does not represent the full scope of his content and reputation in the community, and he would want them to be able to find his older blog posts and other content. So he would want this profile to remain visible to other SAP Community members.
If this sounds like your situation, you may be worried right now that your older, inactive profile will “disappear” soon because you can’t log into that account anymore to set the privacy setting for that profile to “Allow” your profile to be displayed publicly.
I’m here to tell you that all is not lost!
You can still change the privacy setting for that older, inactive profile to public, now or even after it gets hidden by default when our new privacy settings go into effect in the next hours and days. You just need to follow a few simple steps:
- If the old account is not active (meaning you cannot reset the password), fill out this contact form or send an email to sapnetwork@sap.com to ask for their assistance. Let them know that you want to link your old, inactive profile to your current, active one. Give them the link to both of the profiles and/or the SAP ID account numbers, and let them know you are not able to log into the old one as the account is inactive. They will likely respond with a few questions that you will need to answer so that they can verify that you are the true owner of the inactive profile.
- Once the profiles have been linked, you might find that both your inactive profile and your currently active profile are no longer public. In cases where a profile with a privacy setting of “Allow” is linked to a profile with a privacy setting of “Do Not Allow,” the “Do Not Allow” setting takes precedence, to ensure that private profiles do not get unintentionally switched to public. (See the Privacy Setting FAQ.)In the next step you can change this, so that the linked profiles are both public.
- Log into your currently active profile and go into your Account Settings (select Account Settings from the avatar dropdown in the header). In the Privacy Settings section, enable the profile to be publicly displayed by clicking the Edit Privacy Settings link, then selecting the green “Allow” button. This will set the Privacy Setting of the currently active profile AND the linked inactive profile to “Allow.” Now both profiles are visible publicly.
You can read more about Profile Linking in my previous blog post: https://blogs.sap.com/2017/12/14/hey-look-its-both-of-the-tammys-together/
Hello Audrey Stevenson,
Thank you for sharing this information with SAP community. Personally I am in this situation and contacted support team as you have mentioned in this blog.
This information will help other community members facing this issue.
One more positive step toward SAP community.
Cheers,
Yogesh Patel
Hello Audrey,
This is great, thank you so much for sharing this information! Even with my close involvement with the community, I never really understood this process. I have reached out to sapnetwork@sap.com with my request to link an older account I used to own but have forgotten the password to. I will update here how steps 2 and 3 turn out!
Best,
Sajid
is this new? I thought it had always been like that (or at least for a few months at least).. how come it's only been rolled out now?
I'm not sure which part you're referring to that would be new? Profile linking has been available for a while now, yes. But there are a lot of members who don't realize they can still get their profiles linked even if they don't have login access to them, and many are unaware that they can determine the privacy setting of the inactive accounts by linking them to active ones.
Thanks for this! I've been doing SAP work for twenty years with multiple clients, consulting companies, S-numbers, i-numbers, email id's, OSS, etc. It's been aggravating to have so many different forced profiles on SDN, SCN, or whatever this, and has led to my not using it. Maybe this will encourage some old dogs like me to give it another try.
Thanks for your comment! I will pass it on to the profile team, who will be happy to hear this feature is getting use. 🙂
Useful info. One point of concern though, I've received reminder emails about this from sap@mailsap.com. This looks and smells like a password phishing email.
SAP should send important, account related email reminders from sap.com.
Here's a snippet of the email I received:
From: SAP <sap@mailsap.com>
Subject: Important Action: Retaining Your SAP Community Content and Contributions
Important Action: Retaining Your SAP Community Content and Contributions
On June 25, in compliance with our data protection and privacy policies, we will need to anonymize the SAP Community contributions and delete the personal data of inactive members. According to our records, you haven't logged in for several years*.
If you do not log in to SAP.com before June 25, you will permanently lose the ability to edit your blogs, questions, answers, comments, and any other content you've created with this account. You will also lose any progress that you've made on missions, your karma credits, and any other SAP Community history related to your profile.
This is a permanent erasure and cannot be reverted.
To retain your content and contributions to SAP Community, you simply need to log in to your account prior to June 25.
Log in to your SAP.com account
Logging in will signal that you want to keep your SAP Community content and contributions accessible. However, if you want your content and contributions to remain visibly attributed to you, you'll also need to update your account privacy settings. To learn more, please refer to the SAP Community Privacy FAQs.
* If you're an active SAP Community member, you may be receiving this email because you have an older inactive account. You can retain this account's content and contributions by logging in to it or by linking it to your current active account. To learn more, please refer to this information about account linking.