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Oh no I have totally screwed up my Nextcloud contacts list

I was trying to add the contacts that had accidentally gotten saved to a google account from my phone

so I figured "Well heck, this software is super smart, I'll just export all my contacts from my phone, import them into nextcloud, and it'll be clever enough to go "Haha of course he doesn't want to have everyone but these dozen-odd people listed twice, we'll merge the obvious dupes" because it's fancy whizbang modern software"

I figured wrong

I figured so, so wrong

NEXTCLOUD MERGE CONTACTS, I splammered onto my keyboard, NEXTCLOUD CONTACTS MERGE HOW I continued, NEXTCLOUD DUPLICATE CONTACTS HOW TO FIX said my fingers in an undignified panic, and I staggered onto the nextcloud forums for lost souls who'd damned themselves the same way I had. "Help me," whispers user apalfalba, user szaiman responds with a github link, I scroll down, the computer says 3 YEARS LATER: CLOSED. 3 YEARS LATER: ARCHIVED.

Another wild random tab in the dark, here is another poor bastard who made the same mistake in 2023, David says can anyone help thanks, in response he receives two hearts and 669 views and then

3 months later

Closed on Jun 5, 2023

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

I wonder briefly if everything worked out for David, after all we close issues when they're resolved right, not when they're still broken after three months, right? Oh dear, I have to go to another one of the tabs I opened a few minutes ago, I duckduckwent to so many tabs, here's another... poor appddo, what happened to you? You took the same wrong turn I did, and what were you told...

"The easiest workaround I could find - and yes you non google people won’t like it - is to

export the address book from nextcloud as vcf
go into your google contacts (or just create a burner google account with no contacts)
import the contacts in the web ui
fix the duplicate contacts via the “merge and fix” tool from google
export the now cleaned up contacts as vcf again
import the cleaned up contacts into a new address book"

Take Back Control as they say, yes... next tab, and I hope there's some non-slippery surface somewhere on the sides of this well I've dropped into, it's the github tab, it's the issue about there not being a contact merge, this one's been linked to a lot on this journey. Deep breath, let's go in.

Oh no. Silverhook opened this issue in 2016:

"In the old contacts you were able to consolidate or merge two contact entries into one.

Example how this could work:

Alice is in the contact list twice
select both contacts for Alice
a “merge” button appears
click on the “merge” button
the two entries for Alice merge into one (if needed, user can be prompted regarding collisions)

This was particularly useful after importing contacts or syncing between several devices.

It would be great to have this option in the new contacts app as well.

As a bonus, a command to scan all your contacts for such duplicates and to consolidate them, would be awesome."

That sounds great, Silverhook! What do other people think...

scroll scroll scroll

A bounty appears. This is where people give money to a holding-onto-the-money guy and the holding-onto-the-money guy gives the money to whoever fixes the thing. The bounty raises in value. November 2021, the bounty is at $85. June 2022, the bounty is at $120. "This functionality would be very useful." "Please, do address this issue. It is extremely important."

And then... the guy, of course, there's always the guy:
"I don't speak for the Nextcloud project (I'm just a casual contributor every once in a while) but I encourage everyone here who thinks this functionality would be useful, or is extremely important, to contribute a pull request adding it."

and when there's one guy, then another will turn up soon...
"No one is stopping you from writing the code. Or paying someone to write it."

Reply: "I haven't got the time, but I gave some money."

But then there was some... concerns, about the holding-onto-the-money guy.

Brief discussion about can we get a new holding-onto-the-money guy, because the current holding-onto-the-money guy looks like he might run off with the money.

Inconclusive.

I can taste the desperation in this brief exchange:

-----
🐇 "Why is NC missing this very important thing. It is the third time I had to re-do all my contacts with some offline tool."
-----
🦊 👀 "Which tool do you use"
-----

And then the holding-onto-the-money guy ran off with the money and so there was no more money to fix this problem.

Time flows by, nextcloud gets money, they spend it on AI, they post to mastodon about AI and everyone shouts at them for it, the pinball man draws a very nice picture of a dick in a mousetrap and he's very proud of it, and someone posts "Eight years ago. Is there any hope this will ever get addressed? Seems like devs rather build shiny new AI features, something so basic is not exciting enough?" and nextcloud people say OH THUMBS DOWN FOR THAT COMMENT, THUMBS DOWN FOR MOTHER FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS, The Guy says HEY BUSTER THIS IS OPEN SOURCE AND YOUR COMMENTS ARE HARSH AND UNHELPFUL, The Other Guy says HEY WISEGUY THIS ISN'T SOME GUY'S PET PROJECT THIS IS A GMBH WITH SIGNIFICANT REVENUE AND A TEAM OF FULL TIME MOUSETRAP BOTHERERS and I do a record scratch and turn and look directly at you straight into the camera and say "I know what those letters GMBH means," holding up a finger, "because I'm on mastodon," and I turn back to my laptop and I scroll right back up to the very tippy top of the github issue page and I check the date, reminding myself man was it really 2016 when someone asked for this,

Well technically, it was VERY late 2016, December 2016, December THE TWENTY-FIFTH 2016, this guy asked for this feature ON CHRISTMAS FUCKING DAY like the POOR LITTLE MATCH GIRL, this was all he wanted for Christmas, and you know what? I'm gonna click on his github profile pic and find out if he's just fucking dead. Did he freeze to death waiting for this incredibly standard feature. Did he grow a beard down to his ankles then fall over and get little X's for eyes. Is he a skeleton. Has he been dead and buried for seven years with people dragging tables and chairs across the earth atop his grave so they can have a discussion about large language models.

Nope, apparently he's messing around with XMPP, tryna do something with Prosody, so he's at least kind of alive.

I know what I'm talking about, I run a Prosody server too, I'm also kind of alive. I'm the kind of alive where it's half past one in the morning and instead of fixing the problem I'm staring down a rabbithole of figuring out the social dynamics of how this problem isn't getting fixed. Instead of putting my contact list back the way it was, I've stuck my head into nextcloud's armpit. That's the kind of alive I am right now.

You know how all this started? Maybe once a week I log onto facebook and scroll for three seconds and see a swastika and log RIGHT the FUCK back off again, and this time I saw it was my neighbour's birthday, and I went "Oh I should put that in my phone because the intervals between my looking at this horrible website are getting further and further apart," and I went to my nextcloud and she wasn't in there and I frowned and went "Huh she must be in my google contacts, weird I thought I'd exported all those, alright well this won't take a sec I'll juuuuust stick my head into nextcloud's armpit I guess."

She's really damn old, so sometimes I gotta ring her up and say hey are you alive, so I guess tomorrow (when I started this her birthday was today, now it was yesterday) I'll ring her up and say hey happy birthday from yesterday, are you still alive, and she'll say yeah kind of, and I won't tell her about any of this because she's normal, but I'll tell you. I'll tell all of you.

If anybody ever fixes this please tell silverhook merry christmas