Launchpad itself

I have or had two accounts with one email address and two passwords

Asked by Nick

Long ago, I opened an account in Launchpad. At another time, probably later but at any rate in 2007, I opened an account in UbuntuForums.org. I probably didn't know or forgot that they're in the same organization, but I don't know if single sign-on existed at either time. The email address is the same for both. The passwords are different. The names are the same.

I doubt I've ever claimed to have lost my password with you, because I rarely ever say that to anyone and it's usually for a different reason than loss (like a website's database was changed).

Today, I wanted to file a bug report on Ubuntu, so I went to open my Launchpad account. The screen looked familiar due to my using Ubuntu Forums, but I typed my Launchpad password, which failed. I did not try again. I typed my Ubuntu Forums password and that worked.

Does this mean that my Launchpad password will never again be valid? Or do two passwords work?

Is all of my history in the one account that's now valid? Whenever I created my Launchpad account, I probably did something, since I don't open accounts "just in case". I likely wanted to do something at the time.

Thanks.

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Colin Watson
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Best Colin Watson (cjwatson) said : 		#1

Launchpad originally used its own login system (with OpenID support, so that other sites could authenticate against Launchpad). In 2009, that was split out into a separate single-sign-on service, branded "Ubuntu One" though we tend to just call it SSO informally. I'm fairly sure that the forums originally used their own login database, but at some point they were migrated to authenticating against Launchpad or SSO (depending on whether it was before or after the split). It must therefore have been necessary to consolidate all existing accounts with duplicate email addresses. I'm a bit surprised that it's the way round that you report, since I would have expected the existing Launchpad account's password to win, but there may be some odd aspect to the history that I'm unaware of.

At any rate, there can only be one SSO account for a given email address, and an SSO account can only have a single password. Any previous password is thus permanently invalid, unless of course you change the account's password to that again.

None of your account history in Launchpad will have been affected by any of this.

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Nick (nick-levinson) said : 		#2

Thanks Colin Watson, that solved my question.