Oasis: Users can get stuck in demo if they already have an account but start a new demo

[kentonv]

1. Create an Oasis account.
2. Log out.
3. Start a demo.
4. Try to log in with your existing Oasis account.

This won't work, because you can't merge a demo account with an existing account. Unfortunately, there are two big usability problems here:

1. The user has no way to end the demo, in order to allow them to log in with their account.
2. In the case of OAuth login, no error message is displayed. The user is simply redirected back to the home page, still in demo mode. This is a known problem with our OAuth login flow -- errors are not displayed anywhere. See e.g. OAuth login to disallowed guest account gives no feedback sandstorm#1798, Google OAuth fails w/ no warning sandstorm#1755, etc.

[digitalcircuit]

I'm not sure if this would happen in a real-world situation, but it might be worthwhile considering a smooth way to migrate grains from a demo account to an already-existing real account in case someone accidentally starts a demo, thinks they're logged in, creates a few grains, and wants to keep them. Does the demo suggest downloading grain backups before it expires?

This might tie in to bulk grain export/import/backup - see issue sandstorm-io/sandstorm#1535, and possibly be reusable for easier migration between Sandstorm servers, both Oasis and self-hosted.

[bignose-debian]

I'm not sure if this would happen in a real-world situation […]

This has happened to me yesterday, and I can testify to additional usability problems:

• The user is experiencing a site that behaves quite differently from someone who either is logged in to their account or who is logged out of everything. This makes troubleshooting conversations frustrating for everyone because “helpful” community members will insist that the UX is different from what the user actually sees in front of them.

• The data the user has created in the demo is lost when the demo ends, and is not available when they log into their existing account.

[n8willis]

This is happening to me right now. So yes, it can happen in a real-world situation. Thanks to somebody posting a link to a demo grain, I'm locked out of my existing account, with Oasis confused in a halfway-authenticated-but-you-can't-complete-authentication-or-access-your-grains state making it unusable.

It's distressing to learn that this is a known problem and that it isn't being worked on.