I’ve impersonated the system user to change the name and avatar to make it look way cooler and personalized for my forum. However every time I update the forum it renames the system user back to “system”. It’s not so bad to go in and rename it back, but I’m hoping there is a better way to do this. I guess I could make another user and re-author the system posts, but doing it the way I did just seemed to be the most intuitive.
I believe that this should be(come) an officially supported action (renaming and re-avataring the system user).
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That would be great. There is also the “site contact username” setting that I change to the same name, although this does stay set so I don’t have to worry about it. I only mention it because I’m pretty sure it was set to “system” when I started the forum, and might be a good part of the potential future system renaming feature.
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I was just looking to do the same on my forum. So, what is the best way to do this as of now?
“rename system username and change avatar.”
Changing the system user name should work OK in theory because we refer to the system user by ID and not name in the code … can you confirm @sam?
Do not change the system username, it is the unique identifier for the account.
In any case changing the system user avatar is definitely 100% safe.
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no guarantees here, code would need to be reviewed to confirm. we kind of expect the username to be system.
Except for that
- Avatar should be changeable eg: Profile - system - Discourse Meta
- Long name should be changeable
If either of these are reverted after seeding they should be raised separately as a bug.
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Got it, thanks for clarification on this.
In Russian forum system doesn’t make any sense though.
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we only support alpha in username handles so a much huger and more complex change would be needed.
Not necessarily, the name of the system user could be an admin site setting.
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I know this is an old request but just +1 on this one. Making it an admin configurable setting sounds like an amazing idea.
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Is there any update on whether the system username can be renamed, @codinghorror ?
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This would be appreciated. In our goat farmers community named “Козовод” (means one who farms goats) - I’d configure the system to use exactly that name with Russian letters.
Well, even if still limited to username-allowed symbols, being able to make this change in any way would be very helpful.
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I see there’s a system user setting now.
Is it okay to rename the system user by now, or still a problem?
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The is a site setting site contact username that allows the automatic messages to come from another user.
Renaming the system user isn’t configurable yet, but changing the automatic messages to an active admin of the site solves that need.
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Oi Rafael,
Right, that’s the setting I was referring to above.
It actually is configurable. An administrator can easily rename the system user via the configuration interface. The question is whether there is internal code that still refers to that user by id as indicated earlier in this thread, or if this is now fixed and it’s fine to rename that user.
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At our forum we’re trying to build personas around the system and bot user which are in line with the theme of the forum. It works very well to rename these users and change their profile but I wonder if there’s any way that I can make these changes persistent when updating the forum?
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This is still the case, it is untested. However, we are looking into a friendlier default avatar for system rather than 
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It seems that this behaviour is still the case. I renamed the system user to “BetterTogether” and changed the admin config for the system user to match the new username, but every now and then the username of the system user reverts back to “system” without warning.
What mechanism is reverting the username back to “system”, and how can I prevent it from happening?
Thank you.
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Hola. I am a newbie here 
Theoretically, can I get away by just creating a helper function/ method in the view layer to replace “system” with a custom user-defined name? So the custom system username will only affect the view layer. It can be a semi-permanent solution.
At this moment, I want to focus my time on building a custom Discourse theme, so I don’t want to worry too much about backend stuff.
I would prefer for all official accounts on my site to use <SiteName> <AccountName> format, and I was wondering if there are frontend-focused solutions to rename “system” user rather than having to create another user account that might not do anything else.
That being said, having to check all username variables, one by one, every time to look for one specific username sounds more expensive compared to the option of creating another user.
Thoughts?