Manage pseudo renaming correctly

Feature
1

Apparently, renaming a pseudo breaks all the previous mentions. Is it possible to update all the previous links?

Some ideas:

  • Find all the previous mentions and replace them (can be time consuming)
  • Save the unique ID instead of the pseudo in the post
4 Likes
2

Forgive my ignorance, what’s a “pseudo” in this context?

3

Something like @downey

1 Like
4

“pseudo” is the shorthand for “pseudonym” (ie. username) that we, French, often use.

I’ve learned that it isn’t widely used by native English speaker though.

2 Likes
5

Oh, yes sorry. Discourse says “Username”

6

This makes sense to me. I’m not sure why it wasn’t done from the beginning. Am curious to hear why this wasn’t done.

Note that the ‘psuedo’ is also used verbatim elsewhere though, like in the quote-reply above:

[quote="CamilleRoux, post:1, topic:17458"]

2 Likes
7

Yes, but in the quote instance clicking on the username/psuedo doesn’t attempt to take you to their profile, so it isn’t something that would break. Whereas, mentions do break because that is the intent.

8

The linkage between the user name and avatar shown in the quote block would break though:

1 Like
9

This is kind of irrelevant since you can only change username by default for the first 2-3 days after creating your account.

Admins/Moderators can do it any time, of course.

But the point is, for the average user, changing your @username is a rare event – not sure we need to spend any time optimizing for it at the moment.

10

This is true for the user, but for very large organizations, since many @usernames are based on real names (2 out of 6 in this topic so far, and especially in corporate settings), it can be rather common for admins of large instances since a significant % of the population changes names at least once in their life, usually in the time frame where they use online tools. :slight_smile:

Atlassian decided to use usernames as primary keys in their products, and hundreds of admins have been complaining about it for 10+ years, because changing usernames has been impossible/broken that entire time. Granted, with Discourse it isn’t quite that bad because the usernames can actually be changed but it still leaves broken trails of damage around the app.

1 Like
11

To be clear, the long username field – that can be changed as many times as you want, any time.

We’re talking about @username here which may not be tied to your first and last name at all. @username, by default on every Discourse instance, can only be changed for the first few days after the user creates their account.

12

Its tricky there is a very common edge case.

@jane_smith renamed to @jane_jones after she marries. It would suck to force her to keep her surname forever due to this.

Long term I would like to support correction of quotes and mentions on rename but its definitely not in scope for v1. Not even as a community built feature, way too complex.

1 Like
13

Probably even worse after changing a name post-divorce. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
14

I was glad when I could change a username from testacct1 :wink:

Banging an existing inconsistent username to Discourse’s defination might have high effect during migration i.e. old names in to pseudo names
By this I mean “not real but as similar as possible”, a fake. (so maybe faux-code, meh)
IMHO making changes to have a looser definition is not a wise decision.
giving affected members due time and sufficient Notice is a must do.

15

When you do this in the future, don’t forget about users changing their name to @Override and @gmail (Java code and emails)