Problems with the new username feature

@LightningBolt  

 
This

@Joey  

Yknow, I can’t be the only one who finds this kind of silly. “The site wasn’t designed to accommodate name changes, but let’s add it anyway.”

@SuperSupermario24  
I was always against adding the feature (and always have been) but I had no reason other than my poor opinion of the matter to reject the merge, so I accepted it.
 
While the site was not designed to accommodate name changes, it is able to.

Okay, after a very heated discussion and one mental breakdown in IRC, I’ve distilled it to this:
 

@WingbeatPony  

 
The choice is to go to overriding authority who can make people listen to the argument they’re discarding out of hand when it’s presented by you. Doubling down is never a truly successful option.
 
@Joey  

 
This complication is absolutely necessary because it’s the cost of allowing usernames on the site that, as you yourself admitted, is not designed to accomodate name changes.  
It honestly sounds like you’re refusing to accept responsibility for the changes.
 
@byte[]  
It’s still lacking in necessary features that enable other sites with arbitrary namechanging to work. Namely, Steam and Discord’s notes, and Discord’s plethora of user-confirmed login-elsewhere-requiring links that let the user confirm their identity.  
Note that I consider “changing name of the account to hide identity” to be oxymoron. New identity (that you don’t want to be tracked) = new account.
 
It also lacks persistent userlinks - Discord doesn’t do it, but it’s design paradigm is less about persistence than Derpibooru’s, Steam does do them. Specifically, Steam has a number link everyone has and ability to replace it with custom, user-choice link.  
EXTRA BONUS: Steam’s number link is /profiles/[numbers], custom is /id/[userinput]. They’re separate!  
Joey insists that it’s impossible to do persistent old links with changing names, but I’m not ken to the backend and do see the way it could be done: use separate URIs for “old” profile links (static set of old usernames at the moment of namechange feature, plus these users’ IDs for redirecting to new profiles), “new” profile links, and userID links. Something to the point of old:/profiles/liamwhite, new:/ident/byte[], and /userid/persistentarcanenumberstocopypaste.  
Alternately, if backwards compatibility is undesirable and you get Joey to actually admit it, /profiles/ for current nickname, /ident/ for userchoice URI, and /userID/ for the numbers.
 
The “verbal” links after all aren’t the problem as they can be considered temporary, it’s the persistent ones that you click on instead of typing that are the problem.
 
 
P.S. Userchoice URI shouldn’t match any profile that isn’t user’s own current and former nicknames (perhaps only the last former nickname?).

@WingbeatPony  
Keep in mind you can register your account to a random email. This would block the feature off to some (and possibly lead to spamming people if they keep trying name changes under an email someone else has.

I tried to register a new account with all lowercase “zippysqrl, it said the name was taken, I’m not sure if that’s because the existing username check is case insensitive, or if its because its already detecting that the name was recently used.
 
https://derpibooru.org/profiles/zippysqrl obviously does not work anymore  
But thankfully I link to my artist tag for everything instead of my actual account, and should I change my artist tag at any point, aliasing is there to take care of it, how convenient!

@ZippySqrl  
iirc, usernames are no longer case sensitive as of about ~6 months ago.

@LightningBolt  
if that’s the case, then my url issue is easily solved by making urls case insensitive too.
 
Can’t say much for people that do more than just change cases though.

@Oatsy  
That’s squatting, and not only is it something I think we should avoid, it’s something I think is completely avoidable. Sure, it might be done with good intentions, but I think users would appreciate it if they didn’t have to worry about what had become of their old names.

@ZippySqrl  
There’s still a lot of accounts with duplicate names that have different casings. You just can’t create any ore going forward.

@Joey  

 
Dang monopolies on resources. I’ll trade you 3 sheep for 2 of your ore.  
_{^{||Settlers of Catan. For those who never had fun.||}}

@Zeb  
_{Sorry, no ore for you (I’ve seen what you’re doing with it). But would you consider 5 tree for your 3 sheep?}

@Zeb  
_{^{You ain’t getting anywhere near my harbor, man}}

@Joey  
Actually, thinking about this all day, I had an idea. Auto-register dummy accounts for old user names.
 
We could put a “this user is now known as X” link in the about me section/blurb in user title, for directing old links and confused users.
 
The chances of someone having a good reason to want a previously-used name are slim, and freeing them up is less work than chasing down hostile squatters or impersonators.
 
If we really want to automatically cull them all after, I dunno, 6 months or so, it’d take care of registered-but-unused accounts in general, too - one script for two janitorial duties.
 
I dunno if this is easier to code than the other things I’ve suggested, but I think it might be.

@WingbeatPony  

 
If the chances of someone wanting the name are slim, why go through the effort of creating dummy accounts?
 
As for hostile actions: Why can’t those be dealt with the same way they are now?

@Zeb  
It’s solving two issues at once: Dead links and username abuse. (Note that these are the only two things I really think we need to change about the system, too).
 
If the chances of someone wanting the name are slim, the purpose of creating the dummy accounts is to 100% prevent abuse of the names, which is a much higher risk.
 
As for why do this as opposed to hands-on work: Wouldn’t you much rather deal with positive things (freeing up a dead name) than negative ones (policing hostile users)?
 
Besides, it also neatly solves the demonstrably existing problem of the current system: Links going dead every time a user changes their user name. I think that’s something that we’d have to address regardless, and this solution doesn’t require reconfiguring the way user profile links work at all, as the devs were worried we might have to do.

@WingbeatPony  

 
Honestly, I’m fine either way~ But that’s just me.
 

 
That’s something I’m curious about. I know there does exist links to people’s accounts. But is it a common enough of an issue that it needs extra focus on outside of people updating on the rare occasion someone who they do have a direct link to does change their name?
 
Even if the user they link to changes their name every time they can, that’s a maximum of 4 a year.
 
That doesn’t even take into account how rare it could be for someone who does use a direct link. And then that person changing their account. And then that person changing their account name more than once.
 
The issue of the links begins to drop into seemingly trivial levels.

@Zeb  
You’re forgetting that not all links exist on this site. Perhaps people have linked to their profiles on other sites, maybe it’s in someone’s browser bookmarks, but really I think this has to do with your perspective. You’re treating this like a probability, I’m thinking about it more like an eventuality. The fact that it is happening at all, when it could be avoided, ought to be reason enough.
 
Plus, even if this weren’t all that important, this solution is addressing the other problem too. So either think about it like a helpful side bonus, or combining the effort required to tackle two minor issues makes more sense for the amount of work involved compared to if it were just the one problem.

@WingbeatPony  

 
I directly said:  

 
That’s saying I know it exists and will happen.
 
I’m saying that the times of it happening appear to be so infrequent that it would not be worth the effort to focus on correcting it.  
At least, not in the immediate sense.
 
The impression I get from your posts is that it should be something that’s of high concern and should be focused on immediately, instead of as another tire in the car of “Site stuff that needs improving”.

Speaking as one of the people who does a lot of the “cleaning up links and such” behind the scenes after profile name changes, or as a part of aliasing artists as they change their profiles or their names on other sites, allowing people to change their own profile names here has made the whole process ENORMOUSLY more streamlined and easy.
 
And if someone changes their profile name here but has an old link to it someplace that they don’t care to keep updated, then that’s their choice - some people actually intentionally let old links like those age and die when they rebrand themselves.
 
And “policing hostile users” is just the normal background noise of a site like this. I really would rather not design a system around how it might be abused, instead of how it might be useful. And the new profile change feature seems to already have been extremely useful for a lot of people who had been hoping to rebrand themselves.
 
So, speaking as one of the people doing some of the behind the scenes stuff by hand to keep things pointing at the right things, I honestly don’t see what the problem is, or why it’s such a concern.
 
I’m sorry if I’m coming across as not understanding what the big deal is, but I honestly don’t understand what the big deal is.

@Derpy Whooves  
I absolutely agree with you, for the people who want to change their names, this is a welcome feature and its ease is appreciated. My concern is that, in making it so simple, it was left incomplete. I can see that it’s being widely adopted, which means any minor problems are going to quickly compound into bigger ones…and pretty much every issue stems from how the old names are simply dropped.
 
True, some people might prefer to distance themselves, and let the trail run cold. However, in my opinion, it makes more sense for someone in that situation to create a new account altogether, than to design the whole feature around accommodating them by default. I realize that is a matter of personal opinion, but it’s justified in the consequences that stem from that choice.
 
And that is the heart of it. I am basing this on how it might be useful. I think the potential for abuse is high, but the chances are low, so the more pressing concern is one of confusion on behalf of others. I also think we do everyone a disservice by letting links within derpibooru itself go dead. If you think there won’t be much of that, just look at this and realize it’s only one example of how people are linking directly to profiles.
 
This feature might be useful to the people using it, but for everyone else, it’s missing some opportunities to extend a courtesy. Parking a forwarding address link on the old name isn’t just to give peace of mind to the user who changed it, it’s to keep the site running smoothly. Other sites that offer name changing either follow a different paradigm (Discord is a more immediate, transient system, with no archival priorities), supplement the feature with things we do not have (Steam keeps a public record of names used and permalinks to accounts), or have problems that we can avoid with a little extra effort up front (Tumblr is plagued by squatters and impersonators, precisely because of how they make abandoned names available).

More clarity:  
You have put in the effort to figure out what the old name was from the new name. You have not made it possible to find the new name from the old name.
 
The argument for distancing one’s self with the rebrand doesn’t make a lot of sense when all favorites, comments, uploads, etc. are retained, and adjusted to reflect the new name. Someone wanting to put all that behind them does not benefit from these features.

@WingbeatPony  
Those uploads/comments/faves would not exist under the old name. Which is what some people want to have happen. No longer wanting their old name on certain material or just the internet in general.

I was under the impression that updating links and redirecting where necessary was going to be part of the update to accommodate the new feature, I had this impression for well over a year, should it ever actually be implemented, as it’d just make sense if it was like that. (And the necessary database manipulations for such being the reason name-changing was put off for like 4+ years.)  
Why it was rolled out so soon without such features, means yes, it IS unfinished. Prioritising name-changing as a feature but excluding the rest of what makes it a functional feature, saying it’s “not a high enough priority” resulting in dysfunction with broken links and whatnot.. that’s like..  
You wouldn’t push the front-end of a security update without finishing the back-end to ensure everything still functions as it should and doesn’t fuckin’ break or have any backdoors. With the excuse “we’ll just wait until someone finds the backdoor, then patch it”.  
Finish the whole feature before you roll it out. prevent the dysfunction and abuse before it occurs, NOT after.  
So I agree with wingbeat, DISABLE the feature until such things have been patched, otherwise more and more links are going to die over time, causing more work in the long run to fix them all.