Yea, users donât have permissions to change their own usernames. If you want to change it, you need to contact a forum moderator, such as Aaron Gertler, JP Addison, Julia Wise and myself (not sure exactly who else has the relevant permissions).
Feel free to add a comment or send me a message with your desired username.
(This is something we havenât edited from LessWrong, so this is me speaking for why I agree with their call, not why I made it myself.) Iâd say itâs a little of both. Iâd like to allow users to change it if itâs important, but heavily discourage changes that lose continuity of user identification without much gain. If you have to talk to a human to do it, youâre only going to do that if you think itâs important. Maybe in the ideal case weâd do something like facebook, where they let you do it, but discourage you through multiple levels of âare you sure?â and âyou wonât be able to change your name again for x daysâ. And/âor we could implement moderator review. But we probably wonât prioritize building these, as it seems like a lot of UI functionality that will be very rarely exercised, which is a recipe for bugs.
I second this. Right now, we review all new users when they join the Forum, including their names. Weâd also want to review all name changes if users could make them, which isnât too different from users asking us for name changes (though infrastructure allowing that would be nice to have someday).
For anyone who wants an example of how a username change could cause a prblem: If you try to use âWill MacAskilIâ (with a capital âIâ instead of the second âLâ) as a username, youâll be caught before your account is approved. So weâre also wary of someone changing their name to that and then pretending to be Will for a bit.
Yea, users donât have permissions to change their own usernames. If you want to change it, you need to contact a forum moderator, such as Aaron Gertler, JP Addison, Julia Wise and myself (not sure exactly who else has the relevant permissions).
Feel free to add a comment or send me a message with your desired username.
Is that an intentional policy, or just a feature that hasnât been implemented yet?
If intentional, could you say why? Obviously it could be confusing, but there are some substantial downsides to preventing it.
(This is something we havenât edited from LessWrong, so this is me speaking for why I agree with their call, not why I made it myself.) Iâd say itâs a little of both. Iâd like to allow users to change it if itâs important, but heavily discourage changes that lose continuity of user identification without much gain. If you have to talk to a human to do it, youâre only going to do that if you think itâs important. Maybe in the ideal case weâd do something like facebook, where they let you do it, but discourage you through multiple levels of âare you sure?â and âyou wonât be able to change your name again for x daysâ. And/âor we could implement moderator review. But we probably wonât prioritize building these, as it seems like a lot of UI functionality that will be very rarely exercised, which is a recipe for bugs.
I second this. Right now, we review all new users when they join the Forum, including their names. Weâd also want to review all name changes if users could make them, which isnât too different from users asking us for name changes (though infrastructure allowing that would be nice to have someday).
For anyone who wants an example of how a username change could cause a prblem: If you try to use âWill MacAskilIâ (with a capital âIâ instead of the second âLâ) as a username, youâll be caught before your account is approved. So weâre also wary of someone changing their name to that and then pretending to be Will for a bit.