It is not possible for Piwik to know that this the same user across two browsers. If you specify the User ID once in each browser then I expect it should attach all sessions to the user id. Closing as works by design I think.

I am not seeing this work properly. Any anonymous page views prior to someone submitting a form are not getting pulled into the actual userID profile. The anonymous page views are kept separate.

again this only happens when a userID is existing. If this is a brand new user. the userID properly associates anonymous visits into the correct user profile.

Only when this user comes back again ( new browser - cleared cookies etc. ) that the anonymous page views do not properly get pulled into the userID profile.

let me know if I should explain this more...

Any anonymous page views prior to someone submitting a form are not getting pulled into the actual userID profile.

These visits should be pulled in when someone logs in and you set User ID. But actually this works only when the User logs in in the same visit (eg. within 30min). if the user does pageviews etc. then comes back 35min later, then it will not change the previous anonymous visit to this user id.

does it make sense and maybe explain your issue?

Correct. This is what I am seeing.

This is an issue causing a problem for me too @mattab . The behaviour I have observed is that as soon as I assign a UserId to a visit, then the visitorId for that visitor is changed to a new one. It updates all PIWIK logs accordingly for that visit, and assigns the userid for that specific visit. However since the visitorId has now changed, I have in effect lost the connection to all that person's previous visits to the site. I assume your thinking here is to force complete separation because the previous visits were anonymous whereas the only in the current visit they have identified themselves, however it makes the job of a site owner to track back to very first visit, very first referrer etc - that much harder. i.e. Some one visits a site 5 times and only on the 5th time do they register and have a UserId created and assigned - I'd want the visitorId to remain the same so I can easily view the entire history right back to the first visit. Is there a config setting to alter this behaviour perhaps?

Thanks

Another issue / query is that I can't use the "Visitor Profile" view / widget to filter only by UserId and therefore get a complete picture view of the visit / interaction history of one of my system's users. By only filtering on visitorId, especially when coupled with the issue of changing visitorId (my last comment), means the "Visitor Profile" widget can only ever show part of the picture. My only route is to do a segment Visitor Log search, and then require my clients to open up multiple "Visitor Profile" popups, each of which only show part of the full picture... Am i missing something here at all?

Many thanks

I assume your thinking here is to force complete separation because the previous visits were anonymous whereas the only in the current visit they have identified themselves,

👍

however it makes the job of a site owner to track back to very first visit, very first referrer etc - that much harder. i.e. Some one visits a site 5 times and only on the 5th time do they register and have a UserId created and assigned - I'd want the visitorId to remain the same so I can easily view the entire history right back to the first visit. Is there a config setting to alter this behaviour perhaps?

there is no config setting to select this alternative behavior. Maybe you can create a separate issue as this one is closed. I think it would make sense to have such feature, although I can say it's not high priority for us (we will focus on 3.0.0: https://github.com/piwik/piwik/milestones/3.0.0)