Allow aggregating the same per

Allow aggregating the same person across projects.

If you have the same person's contributions in the same project listed as two or more people, you can use "alias" to aggregate them into one.

If you are registered to ohloh, and have contributions in more than one projects, you can "I am this person" to aggregate them into one.

What you cannot do is to aggregate the same person that is not member of ohloh across projects. Could you add such a feature?

For example, I know these are the same Paul Eggert, currently at UCLA.

projects/1027/contributors/1355 projects/700/contributors/1355 projects/3868/contributors/1355 projects/3630/contributors/1355 projects/3867/contributors/1355 projects/4141/contributors/1355 projects/3547/contributors/1355 projects/15/contributors/1355 projects/1237/contributors/1355 projects/278/contributors/13265 projects/6802/contributors/1355

I dunno how the database works, but couldn't you save yourselves a lot of effort by piggy backing the feature on to the users system?

To my mind, what's being suggested is pretty much the same sort of commit claiming at we already have, just for unregistered users, ya?

In that case, why not add a flag to the users table ... something to mark users as "users to be" or phantom users ... and then use the code that's already written for handling them? Should restrict the database jiggery to a reasonably minor change, and make most of the work updating the appropriate interfaces to support the flag...

Plus, that way, if/when that user actually signs up, you just need to remove the flag and update the account's details.

Sounds like a bit of a hack, but it makes reasonable sense to my mind.

It's not just Paul, but Linus also appears both in git and the kernel ;-)

You probably could register as these non-members with secret password, say "I'm this person" a few times, and then disable the account for end-user log-in. When they actually join, they will find that "somebody else" claimed to be them, but I presume you already have a resolution procedure in place for such a case anyway, don't you?