Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

It happens a lot lately when I try merging author profiles and get "page not found" instead of opening the author page. I wanted to merge Tellegen Toon into Toon Tellegen. But when I click the first name, it's not found.
Maybe I'm not following some recent updates, could it be caused by resent editing the book under this name? So my guess we should merge the author profile first, then correct the listings. Or should I report GR staff each time it occurs? Does anyone have the same issue?

"Page not found" happens when there are no valid books on that profile.
But: when there are combined editions of a book, and all but one editions are listed with the correct author, and one edition with a different version of the author, that book with its editions will not show up in the list of books of the wrong profile.
Note: an 'empty' author profile might still contain quotes or followers.

When you know how the URL's for GR are made, you have the option to still go to the edit page.
Take your example: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Change "show" in the URL to "edit" and you'll be able to edit the author profile to merge it.
To check if there is still a book attached to that profile, the disambiguate page can be helpful. That one can be found through the author edit page, or directly by changing "show" to "disambiguate" in the URL.
When doing that for the example: https://www.goodreads.com/author/disa..., you'll see that there is still one book attached to this profile.

So my guess we should merge the author profile first, then correct the listings.
I guess it depends what needs to be done, and on the number of books. If you want to check all editions on the wrong profile, it is easier to do that before merging the profiles. The books might get 'lost' among all other books once the profiles are merged.

Or should I report GR staff each time it occurs?
By changing the URL you can merge them yourself. Unless the target author is a GR author, in which case only GR Support can merge them.

Thank you so much for the detailed answer. I got an idea about links but didn't think it through. It's really helpful!

Thanks, Arenda! I have had this problem recently, too. Your URL information is very helpful.

My thanks, also, to Ekaterina for asking this question. Now I can fix the author profiles that have been bugging me.