Utilise permanent account identifiers, rather than usernames, for hyperlink referee attribution

Contribute Feature
1

When a user modifies their username, all hyperlinks that they have distributed become, thereafter, inaccurately attributed to whomever else decides to utilise that username. Even if that does not occur, it means that all telemetry provided by that argument is rendered useless, for it no longer references the actual referee.

An example is https://meta.discourse.org/t/70952/2?u=roke_julian_lockhart, [1] which should be https://meta.discourse.org/t/70952/2?u=129529, for it to remain active across username replacements.

  1. t/409276 ↩︎

2

The traditional solution has been not to let people change their username after a brief period of time. The workaround is to update all links to the username if they do change it.

Do you have a community where it’s important for users to frequently and continually change their usernames?

1 Like
3

@pfaffman, what does that solve?

This does not occur to URIs that have not been posted on the platform, because that is impossible. Additionally, why waste CPU cycles to replace them?

Currently, not particularly so. Though, I participate in some that appear to permit this.