Hi, We recently started using Discourse with thousands of users imported. Is there a way to enable Username Change so that the user can only make a change a specified number of times instead of nuber of days past registration? I would like to give users the ability to change their username say 2 times before they must contact an admin to make the change.

No, this is not possible at the moment. It could possibly be achieved using a plugin.

In Discourse by default, username changes are only allowed for accounts of 3 days old or less. Have you modified this default setting? If so, why?

We have a very large user base that was imported into Discourse. Most will not log on within 3 days of their Discourse IDs being created (it was more than 3 days before Discourse went into production). Their user names were created from this import. Our support staff does not have the time to field legitimate change requests that come in after the 3 day window so the decision was made to allow users to change their own IDs after more than 3 days.

That workaround only works if we can guarantee the majority users will log in to the Discourse forums within a specified period of time. Discourse is not the primary function of the system but a way to get help.

Yes SSO is in use. The username that is created for Discourse is based on the user’s full name. Some people do not want that exposed in Discourse so they want to change it.

Discourse can be configured to override the username with one provided in the SSO payload. Why not make your IdM authoritative in this case and control renaming from there?

I’m not opposed to adding this feature, because I do think communities should minimize username changes .. but it’s a fair amount of engineering work to add a change count limit, versus the simple date-of-join protection we have now.

I wouldn’t add the feature since it would not be easy. I was just wondering if it was there and I missed a setting.

Can Username Change be limited to number of times?

Product Support

sam (Sam Saffron) April 24, 2019, 3:54am 5

Easy workaround, raise the username change period site setting, finally when all dust settles turn it back down

Topic		Replies	Views
Users' ability to change usernames: any pitfalls? General username	5	266	September 8, 2026
User has no option to change username? Product Support	14	17988	May 10, 2021
Why Limit the Days a User can Change their Username Feature	1	807	January 28, 2019
Ability to Change Username on Discourse ID Forums? Product Support discourse-id	5	457	April 26, 2026
Any options for over-riding the username restrictions? Product Support	14	4398	September 6, 2018

Can Username Change be limited to number of times?

Related topics