I am a member of another forum related to Portsmouth Football Club (Pride of the South, etc., etc.) We have the ability to change our usernames at any time. At one point, I changed my username, kept my avatar the same, I had the same large post count, and I kept my signature the same. Many of the regular members there twigged who I was, without a problem. SOme of the fringe members, however, didn't keep up. Equally, when some fringe members changed names, us regulars couldn't keep up.
The Mod team have discussed this on a couple of occasions - with over 90,000 members we don't need the confusion of people constantly changing names on a whim. We want to be able to relate back to people's past history, if there is a problem, to see if there have been problems previously.
However, we do appreciate that people can occasionally choose usernames that don't fit with how they want to portray themselves, once they have got used to the atmosphere of the board. Chad has set the board up such that new members, up to 60 posts, can change their username once via their control panel. We feel that is the best compromise position, and we aren't going to alter that position, save for any extreme extenuating circumstances - for instance if there turned out to be a mass murderer who's online name elsewhere was also the_lock_man, I would probably want to change my own username to disassociate myself from that other person.
In Sophie1992's instance, I can appreciate that the change isn't huge, but that then gets into a whole new area of judging whether a proposed name change is great enough to be blocked - it took us long enough to decide on the criteria that we have, let alone to compile criteria on what constitutes a small name change, and what constitutes a large one. If we were to judge each case on its individual merits, then people who had been turned down would be looking for precedents and then lodging appeals. All of which adds up to an awful lot of work for the Mod Team, bearing in mind that we don't get paid for giving up our time to run this place.
I hope that clarifies the issue for people. Those are the rules that we've set for ourselves, and we don't want to change them any time soon. Thank you for understanding, have a nice day.
(And please remember that multiple accounts are against the rules)
The Mod team have discussed this on a couple of occasions - with over 90,000 members we don't need the confusion of people constantly changing names on a whim. We want to be able to relate back to people's past history, if there is a problem, to see if there have been problems previously.
However, we do appreciate that people can occasionally choose usernames that don't fit with how they want to portray themselves, once they have got used to the atmosphere of the board. Chad has set the board up such that new members, up to 60 posts, can change their username once via their control panel. We feel that is the best compromise position, and we aren't going to alter that position, save for any extreme extenuating circumstances - for instance if there turned out to be a mass murderer who's online name elsewhere was also the_lock_man, I would probably want to change my own username to disassociate myself from that other person.
In Sophie1992's instance, I can appreciate that the change isn't huge, but that then gets into a whole new area of judging whether a proposed name change is great enough to be blocked - it took us long enough to decide on the criteria that we have, let alone to compile criteria on what constitutes a small name change, and what constitutes a large one. If we were to judge each case on its individual merits, then people who had been turned down would be looking for precedents and then lodging appeals. All of which adds up to an awful lot of work for the Mod Team, bearing in mind that we don't get paid for giving up our time to run this place.
I hope that clarifies the issue for people. Those are the rules that we've set for ourselves, and we don't want to change them any time soon. Thank you for understanding, have a nice day.
(And please remember that multiple accounts are against the rules)
Haha
