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I am working with Stack Exchange /users/ data and trying to get a user's "united" profile, to see what sites they're active in other than the queried site. As an example: http://stackexchange.com/users/7dee0fe4-9eac-40f4-8521-89ce6916bd66?tab=accounts shows all the active sites for Jeremy Banks. Each user has an "ID" number that is specific to that site, and the same User ID on a different site corresponds to a different user. How do I get that unique user hash (association_id, here, "7dee0fe4-9eac-40f4-8521-89ce6916bd66") from the user data?

I see the users/{id}/associated method, for API use. It requires the "association_id," which doesn't always appear in the list of values returned by /users/{ids} and is not in the users.xml file in the data dump.

Where do I find it, or how do I make it?

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association_id appears in the returns of /users/{ids} for user's who have existing associations.

For example:

... more ... "
up_vote_count": 871,
"down_vote_count": 48,
"accept_rate": 82,
"association_id": "f403b833-81b1-421c-96e6-ede6e9efb3c4",
"user_questions_url": "/users/80572/questions",
"user_answers_url": "/users/80572/answers",
"user_favorites_url": "/users/80572/favorites",
... more ...

While it is possible for a user to have a Stack Exchange network profile independent of associations, this ability did not exist at the time of the 1.0 API release (when the /users/{id} method was added) and as such isn't really exposed natively yet.

With regards to the CC data dump, we don't include association_id as it hasn't been very stable historically.

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  • How does the email hash correspond with association_id? Is it suitable to unify user profiles across sites, or do many people use different addresses for different sites? It looks like the only way to get this information, missing from the CC dump, would be to query the API for all users. Is that accurate, and if so what are the rate limits I need to design to use?
    – WBT
    Commented Jul 26, 2011 at 17:39
  • I'm hoping some of this will become easier with the switch to account IDs. Commented Sep 24, 2011 at 23:32

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