This is needed once it will be possible to edit the mail address of a manually added user (which is currently part of one of the top 3 requested features here on canny platform). To avoid two users with the same username.

At Avo we have repeat customers. This means we have voters that historically added a lot of feedback at their previous company and are now back with a new email address at their new company.

We would like to be able to reach out to voters and feature-requesters via their most up-to-date email—both in the purpose of asking follow up questions when we start working on feature requests, and to notify them of a release related to their feature request.

For this purpose it would be valuable to be able to merge voters' accounts and/or define a new "primary" contact email.

Is this already possible in Canny or is there a workaround for this that you recommend?

We add a lot of feedback on behalf of users in Canny.

When we get feedback through Help Scout, we know the email and add it to the user when we create them. However we also want to track feedback we see in public forums like social media and WordPress.org support forums. Those folks are clearly using our product, but asking them for an email in order to log a vote would be awkward.

For distributed open source projects like ours, we don't have access to the entire stack, so we can't make use of the Canny API to pass an email along automatically.

Our current workaround is to delete the old user if that person ends up creating their own Canny account using their email. This isn't ideal and requires us to catch the duplication manually.

Per our conversation it sounds like this is a symptom of us not invalidating the user search cache after creating a new voter. We might want to look into user merging eventually, but I think fixing this cache issue will solve most problems in the short term.