Update quotes and mentions when username is changed

[JagWaugh (Andrew Waugh)]

So I’d create a new user account, change ownership of all posts to the new user and change all references (which shouldn’t be a problem with the usernames paul(a)kreuzer, but if someone answered things like “Hey Paul, …” that would stay untouched)?

I’m not really sure what steps 2 and 4 do.

That cribsheet is detailed to the way our migration worked.

Just rename your account with the GUI. This changes ownership and rebakes all your posts.

So what is left over are posts in response to you. This means that any @mentions are a straight replacement "@paul " for "@paula " and rebake. The only thing you won’t be able to catch is “Hey Paul” or “As Paul wrote”, but these will be self evident from within the context of the posts.

[chrispanag (Christos Panagiotakopoulos)]

I’m bumping this topic especially for this case:

@sam

I always wanted our users routes to be /users/ID/etc this would be a non issue

@sam

In practice renaming users is really super rare, but there is something to be said about the extra flexibility you get with ids, especially if we ever allow Chinese usernames etc.

Firstly, you now allow UTF-8 usernames… so…

Also, this issue was discovered: Unicode username with Σ as the final char leads to an error loading profile page

Long story short, there are inconsistencies between Javascript’s, Ruby’s and Postgresql’s handling of various UTF-8 characters. (eg: in uppercasing-lowercasing). I think the aforementioned issue could make UTF-8 characters unsafe in usernames if another routing method, involving the user id is not implemented.

So, it’s a chance to revisit this decision

[simon]

Just adding a note here to say that when a username is changed, quotes and mentions are now automatically updated. Changing a username will not break quotes and mentions.