Why are users seeing "Error - Could not find social user record" when trying to submit a question through the Ask the Community page?

Environment:

Oracle B2C Service August 2015 and later versions using Customer Portal Framework 3.3.1 or later

Resolution:

Contact records can be created in a variety of ways. Various methods may not, by default, include populating the social data necessary to allow a user to fully interact with Community Self-Service on the end-user pages. Normally, logged-in contacts for whom this is the case will receive a popup box when visiting the Ask the Community page asking them to enter a display name, but your customization of the end-user pages may inadvertently remove this functionality, causing the error message to appear.

The easiest solution is to use the standard widget user/UserInfoDialog to prompt users to set a display name before adding, rating, or flagging social content, as is seen in the reference implementation.

Display names need not be unique, and can be modified later by the end-user on the Account Settings page found at /app/account/profile or through the account dropdown after sign-in. Contact records that are created from the end-user pages request this information at signup by default, so those users will be able to post immediately if your default role sets allow them to do so.

Some types of contacts for whom this issue exists, however, include:

• All contacts created prior to migrating to the Customer Portal 3.3 framework;
• Contacts created in the Agent Console; and
• Contacts created via Pass-Through Authentication (PTA).

Customizations to the customer portal that include removal of the UserInfoDialog widget and have contacts created like this should take special care to add the display name by some other method, such as by a PTA hook or contact workspace modifications, depending on circumstances.