Why is SCN stealing and defacing my identity?

[Former Member]

For more than 9 years now I've been participating in this community under this account http://scn.sap.com/people/anton.wenzelhuemer .

A few days ago -without any kind of prior notice or info I found out that my Bio had been altered by SCN and that I wasn't able to login anymore (from most of my devices - some still seem to be able due to undeliberately using one of the many SCN account management bugs).

If you look at above mentionend account's bio you will learn that I work for SAP in Walldorf but actually I never ever worked for SAP and not in Walldorf and until recently my account showed the correct information regarding my acctual affiliation and work address.

An enquiry in this matter was answered by an absolutely ignorant - anonymous (sign o' the times?) support person whose first reply started like Hi Anton., As we see you are already reflecting in to the portal ..., whatever he or she wanted to tell me with that. After some mails exchanged back and fourth where this person did not respond to any of the single issues raised by me I am left with

As per the new SCN platform it won't be possible on our part to change the mailing address for a C-user account

The new SCN platform? Does he or she talk about the one rolled out in spring 2012? Do they still call it new at SCN?

Anyway ...

What is ths about the C-user account?

Long story as short as possible:

When started my SAP carreer in 2003 I worked for a company which was an SAP partner developing software together with an Industry Solution unit at SAP. Not as a subcontractor but an equal partner developping on (their) joint platform. For this I received a so-called C-user, a user object to use SAP's intranet to a certain extent determined for C-users.

I joined SDN(!) in 2004 and for the sake of convenience I used the same login name for SDN as for my SAP access. As far as I remember, there was no automatic linkage at all between SDN and SAP user accounts, SAP was SAP and SDN was the project of a few crazies, a lot of whom I got to like a lot.

A few years later user management was to a certain degree merged and some issues started to arise. But with some hazzle they managed to enable me a life with one account for SCN and SAP.

Over the years my working group was bought by another company so I changed my employer but not my SAP affiliation and - C-user. Those changes were easily adopted in SCN.

When I left my last employer about 1 year ago of course I had to return my C-user and access rights to the SAP intranet but since I stayed in an SAP related job I wanted continue to use my identity at that network. This was technically more difficult than I expected (actually the C-user can't really be re-used and usually isn't; on SCN it's supposed to be nothing more than a logon name) but in the end was resolved to my expectation.

And now came the really unexpected changes.

What support basically told me was to get along and create a new user and continue with that. How I restore certain access rights not connected to my username but to my person remained unanswered. Achievements for instance(even though I don't care much), content management features to manage 'my' content, access to certain restricted forums, affiliated sites, access to my user profile(!).

Whatever the crappy account management modules at SCN really did, my full bio is a really funny mixture of historic artefacts of my person, something like

Anton Wenzelhuemer

working for SAP in Walldorf, Germany

but a street address in Vienna, Austria (my actual employer)

and a telefone number of my former employer Siemens

Most of that data wasn't visible publicly but as a sever consequence all my SCN notification are sent to an SAP email address which is de-activated - by SAP and cannot be changed by me.

So, to come to a conclusion, for me SCN's (and SAPs) user account management at their various web properties is withouth exaggeration one  of the worst I ever experienced in any web presence, large or small. The user experience with respect to account issues (login, registration, ..) of affilaite sites like e.g. SAP jam is unbelievably bad.

And additionally now, probably every user has to be aware that somewhere buried in the TOS they somehow must have a statement that you don't own your SCN identity and it is subject to change and any other tampering by SAP at any time.

Currently I don't have any other clue than to discuss the issue with a lawyer and request complete removal of my account according to German data protection laws if SAP continues to deny me usage of my own account and continues to display wrong information about me.

Why SCN does that is a complete mystery to me.

cheers,

Angry Bird

(btw, my son's current favourite toy figures)

[Former Member]

You might want to contact directly, he might be able to help. Although there isn't yet an official way for handling account merges (they are working on it), there have been a few exceptions.

[Former Member]

I would like to correct myself. Apparently they no longer can, even if they wanted to. The details are here.

[Lukas_Weigelt]

The fact that this is happened, to such a well known SCN-Member as you at that, makes me feel uneasy...

[former_member186746]

Hey Anton,

As an outsider this was an interesting read.

I wish you good luck and hopefully a satisfying end to your ordeal.

Cheers, Rob.