Changing email address of a blog

  • Unknown's avatar
    jamesweebles · Member ·

    My word, this .com business is very, very confusing.

    So there’s a website, mcgbiomarkers.wordpress.com

    It was setup by a lady named martha. So, her email address is what displays in settings.

    I need to be the new manager of this website. So, she went into settings and put in my email address. And as expected, it says it’s pending and that I need to verify in my email.

    Ok so here’s the first issue: for some reason it won’t let her put my existing wordpress.com email address in there. When she tries, it says that email is already being used.

    Um, yes of course it is. I have a WordPress.com account already. I’m pretty sure that you’re supposed to be able to manage multiple websites from the same account right?

    Oh well, so I put in one of my other email addresses that doesn’t have an account already, and it accepts that and changes to pending.

    I receive the verification email, and I click on it. But all it does is take me to a login screen. Well of course I can’t login, because it forced me to use an email that wasn’t already associated with an account.

    So ok I guess I’ll create an account with this email address and then I should be good to go right?

    Wrong. It creates a brand new account but it isn’t associated to the WordPress website in anyway. And if I go back to the verify email and click the link, it just takes me to the account settings of the brand new account.

    WordPress.com has got to be the absolute worst UI I’ve ever experienced. I thought .com was supposed to be the faster, simpler version of .org, but .org is a thousand times easier to navigate.

  • Unknown's avatar
    melviinkhoo · Member ·

    Hi there,

    I’m sorry to hear about your bad experience with WordPress.com.
    The easy way would be to add you as the administrator of the website via the “Users” in the admin dashboard.

    Step-by-step guide: https://wordpress.com/support/user-roles/#adding-users-to-your-site

    I’ve notified the WordPress.com staff to look further into your issue and help you regain access.

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Let’s see if we can help you sort this out…

    So there’s a website, mcgbiomarkers.wordpress.com

    It was setup by a lady named martha. So, her email address is what displays in settings.

    The first important thing to note here is that on WordPress.com, emails are tied to your account, not to individual sites in your account. So the email address is for the mcgbiomarkers username, not the mcgbiomarkers.wordpress.com site. The email is the unique identifier for your account, so multiple accounts cannot share the same email.

    I receive the verification email, and I click on it. But all it does is take me to a login screen. Well of course I can’t login, because it forced me to use an email that wasn’t already associated with an account.

    Up until this point you were on the right track, i.e. using another email, not already associated with a WordPress.com account, for the mcgbiomarkers account.

    To complete the verification process, you needed to log into the account you were verifying, i.e. mcgbiomarkers, using the password that I assume Martha has provided to you. Alternatively you could have forwarded that email to Martha, have her click the link to complete the verification, following which you could request a password reset to gain access to the account and set your own password.

    By creating a new account instead, that other email is also now tied to a WordPress.com account and cannot be used for the mcgbiomarkers account.

    =====

    You have a couple of options here:

    1) I see you have a Gmail address. Gmail comes with unlimited built-in aliases, which are all the same email as far as Gmail’s concerned, but that our system sees as different emails. For example, firstnameLastname[at]gmail.com and firstname.lastname[at]gmail.com both refer to the same inbox. So if you’re using a version without periods for your current account, you can sprinkle in some periods for the version you use for the other account.

    You can also create aliases using the + sign. Let’s say your email for this account is mymail[at]gmail.com, you can use the email mymail+mcgbiomarkers[at]gmail.com for Martha’s account. That way you can have multiple WordPress.com accounts without having to create multiple email accounts.

    2) Delete the new account you created. You’ll find that option at https://wordpress.com/me/account. Make very sure you’re logged in as the other account, and not as jamesweebles, so you delete the correct account.

    After you’ve done that you’ll receive an email confirming the account deletion. Reply to that email and request that the email address is immediately deleted completely, rather than only after 30 days, as you want to use it for another account. Then try updating the mcgbiomarkers account again, like you did before.

    Important: Whether you choose option 1 or option 2, make sure you’re logged in as mcgbiomarkers and NOT jamesweebles before you click the link to verify the new email.

    3) Transfer the site to your own account. If it’s not crucial for you to have control over the mcgbiomarkers username itself, you just need to manage the site, you can have Martha transfer ownership of the site to your jamesweebles account. Martha can do that from her end by following the instructions here:

    https://wordpress.com/support/transferring-a-site-to-another-wordpress-com-account/

    This process will completely remove her as a user from the site as well, so while she’ll still have her username account, she’ll no longer have access to the site.

    Let me know if you have any questions, or if you run into any trouble with whichever option you decide to go with.

  • Unknown's avatar
    jamesweebles · Member ·

    Can we all just take a minute to appreciate how stupid I am for not thinking to just add another Adminstrator account?

    Martha isn’t getting any emails from this site, so exporting the posts (which is all I really wanted) wasn’t working because instead of just downloading an XML file like .org it has to email it (dumb but ok). Transferring the blog wasn’t working because again, she’s not getting any emails from the site for some reason.

    But all I had to do was add myself as an Admin because that didn’t require sending her an email haha.

    Thanks for y’alls help, I’m going to have a stiff drink now.

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Glad that worked for you! Let us know if you need further assistance or if you have any questions.

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