Participants may reuse the account they set up for the last conference in Converia. They can save a lot of time and use the comfort of having all their documents accessible in one place. This does not affect the number of duplicates in your conference.
Do not let the seemingly high number confuse you. Converia sets up pairs of potential duplicates in the system. In case a user has more than 3 accounts, the number of found pairs is a lot higher than the number of needed deduplications. For example, if Converia finds 5 accounts of the seemingly same user, it will find 10 potential duplicate-pairs. If Converia finds 10 accounts, there will be 45 pairs. This is more of a mathematical phenomenon. If you search the participants data for name matches, the number of duplicates will be a lot lower. This is the number of deduplications you will need to cleanse your data.
It is not necessarily needed to deduplicate all your participants accounts, but it may be of use for some functions. For instance, after a successful deduplication you can be sure that no reviewer will get submissions in which he himself is marked as one of the authors. You may also check which speakers are not yet registered for the conference. You could also use the deduplication for specific accounts or needs, like checking all the reviewer accounts for possible duplicates before assigning abstracts to reviewers.
We kindly ask you to be meticulously careful when deduplicating accounts, even if it’s a great amount. Wrongly merged accounts can only be separated again with great effort which is also time-consuming.