It's confusing in a community, but since it doesn't happen that often, I think we can manage
My main concern is how it complicates my Trust list viewer, which relies on my list of usernames.That could be a great feature to have here in the forum but your reason is enough already to not allow to change usernames here in the forum
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It could create confusion to other users even if the username change is recorded the forum just work out something with the username, and could also create web bugs in the websites because of the trust list history We just don't know if it could handle it.
As long as it is done with discretion from yhe admins, then username change is not a big issue and would not have a negative effect on the community in terms of scam evasion.
However I would suggest an official log on such changes stating clearly the old username and the new one. I believe something of this sort was done by a member,
I don't know if it's still updated. An official list will be more accurate. So any user who is unsure of who they're dealing with can visit such thread to check if any changes were made on the profile.
Something like:
Old username | New Username | User id | Date of change | Forum rank |
_________________ | __________ | ____________ | ___________________ | ____________________ |
xxx | xxx | xxx | xxx | xxx |
Now, if someone had business with an user of the forum and came back after a long time, how much confuse will he be?
This would solve this issue and it will due to the low number of name change requests that are sent and accepted, it would be fairly easy to keep updated.
I thought of something like that too but I think the forum just works this way, and even if we did that it will still go to create confusion. A unique user ID or ID number could do it but we already started without it.
Another thing is a lot of users here in the forum might abuse this feature.