Thanks for the detail guys. Whilst I'd sort of guessed what it meant (never really had anything to do with databases), I was too lazy and a bit short of time to research it after reading.
Whilst the whole thing is of academic interest to a few of us. it undoubtedly isn't to AWB (and most likely the average user) as you can no doubt judge by the comment from AWB.
Interesting that you mention the history there @MauriceC (of which I was aware) - that sort of thing would cause chaos with posts being removed as well, but of course not what's happened here, and of course there was never any intention to "delete" the original AverageWhiteBloke account - which had already been renamed during migration. (I did notice on SMF one or two other users names had been deleted - but not the posts - as they had become "anonymous"). I'd guess the system works as suggested by @Anonymous
As far as links to other posts go, that was an issue that was hotly discussed during testing. As you may have noticed on migrated posts, where a poster had given a link to another reply, although the link goes to the correct place, the post number here is one more than on SMF - "message 2" here, was "reply 1" on SMF.
But when it comes to "quoted" posts, the in-built link that existed on SMF giving the origins of the quote just does not exist here and so of course none of those actual links were migrated from SMF making the traceability of those, and future quotes here, rather like a needle in a haystack search (unless in the same and short thread, or the poster manually provides a link), just another example of this fine leading forum product. This was one issue we wanted resolved before going live, and is still something we are waiting to be provided in a future update.
Anyway, leaving this rather interesting aside, it's not even clear why the issue was mentioned now as it's been happening from day 1 where users haven't been able to get access to their original account. They've created a new "temporary" account to get onto the forum and explained why they can't get to their old account - whether it be forgotten passwords, wrong email address, no reset email etc. The original account has been recovered, in some cases renamed, password reset, email address updated where needed, and then the "temporary" account has been "deleted". I'd guess it works as Mook suggested because it gets assigned the default Lithium Anonymous Avatar rather than the default silhouette or no avatar, and IIRC this was explained somewhere else - probably on Staging.
So now back to the two points made by the OP - 1) he has his original account and all his posts. 2) It's worth posting again for any future readers, that to discuss contract renewals etc, it's usually best to contact Customer Options on 0800-013-2632.
As far as pressing the "1" key goes, AWB70 might want to bear in mind the possibility that the phone used may be slightly off with the key tones - try another phone, or if there is difficulty with other calls with another phone as well, then there could be some sort of line/exchange problem.
- unless you've made a very large number of posts, when you can't go back far enough - currently limited to 500 pages - then you need to use search 