The Unofficial Guide To Fixing A Botched Trailhead Account Merge
We’ve all been there. You belong to many orgs – Developer Edition, your employers, perhaps orgs for a few different clients or projects. You log into trailhead and you’re presented with a screen to merge your Trailhead accounts.
N.B. If you have suffered headaches from Trailhead account merges going wrong, Please be sure to tweet this article directly to @trailhead asking them to fix this process!
The explanation describes a simple and innocent process designed to make your Trailhead experience much easier:
Looks like you already have a Trailhead account linked to that email address. We can merge them together for you.
Account merges can’t be undone, so read the boring but important details before continuing.
– Badges, points, favorites, hands-on orgs, and trailmixes will be merged to one account.
– Duplicates are excluded from the merge.
– All of your connected logins will be merged, so you’ll be able to log in with any of them to access your Trailhead activity.
However the reality is this can create quite a large headache for you. There is no mention that your primary email address may be changed, potentially resulting in the following:
- Certifications and Superbadges have disappeared;
- Personalized URL has been reset;
- Avatar has vanished;
- Your Followers, Following, Groups, favourite AppExchange packages lists have disappeared
How can we fix this? ?
The first step is take a deep breath. This information can be recovered! I’m going to walk you through the steps I took to straighten everything out after creating quite a mess in my own Trailhead account.
Consider a scenario with these accounts:
MyPreferredTrailheadEmail@gmail.com,
MyPartnerEmail@partner.com,
MyClientEmail@client.com.
The first thing to understand is the merging process changed your primary email address from MyPreferredTrailheadEmail to one of the others, for example, MyPartnerEmail. Your certifications, avatar, etc are still tied to your MyPreferredTrailheadEmail. However, when you log into Trailhead, your profile is searching for certifications related to your new primary email address, MyPartnerEmail.
To fix this, we need to reset our Primary Email Address to the email associated with our certs, superbadges, etc.
- Log into Trailhead with the Email option using your new primary email MyPartnerEmail@partner.com.
- Click your profile avatar (top right) and choose Settings. Disconnect Salesforce usernames, Google Identity, Email Identity, LinkedIn Identity… disconnect EVERY identity associated with your email address MyPreferredTrailheadEmail@gmail.com.
- Open an Incognito browser tab. Go to Trailhead, and click Sign up. Choose the Email option, and sign up with MyPreferredTrailheadEmail@gmail.com.
- In the newly created account, click your profile avatar and choose Settings. In the Social Accounts section, connect your Email identities for MyPartnerEmail and MyClientEmail.
This process will trigger an account merge and all your badges, etc will be returned to your desired email address. Now you’ve restored your full Trailblazer profile, and your primary email address is exactly what it should be: MyPreferredTrailheadEmail@gmail.com.
I think the Account merge feature is a great idea that has been poorly implemented, making it too easy to cause breaking changes to your Trailblazer account.
If this blog helped and you agree that Trailhead needs to reengineer this entire process, please Like and Share this article, Tweet it directly to @trailhead, and be sure to copy me @McGuireTO so I can follow you and make sure your get your Profile restored. Trailhead will not prioritize fixing this broken process if they do not hear directly from us!
And if you feel so inclined, join me on the Trail!