Notification to followers of name change

[FeyPhoenix]

Not sure if this has been brought up before, but it would be very helpful to get a notification of a user's name change if you follow them.

For a few reasons:

1) I occasionally go directly to some of the artists pages that I have commissioned before. If their name changed and they didn't know to say something about it/I missed the update/They didn't make an announcement, I am suddenly getting a 'user does not exist' page.

2) All links to them become broken. This could also be fixed if the system went through and changed these things automatically, but I don't know if that is a viable option (I think DA does it, but I can't recall for certain). Besides, if someone has a name that is a common word or phrase and it was a find and replace type deal, that would be messy. Anyhow, a notification of a name change would be a good way to say to followers that have mentioned them: fix your links

3) Especially in the case of drastically different names, suddenly seeing journals/art/etc from a name you don't recognize. Maybe this is a good thing to some? It might make you click on the name to find out who the hell they are, but for me, and I am bad about this, but when I have a ton of notifications, especially non-art, I usually scan for certain names, or keywords, rather than looking at individual entries, and then clear everything that didn't fit the scan parameters (in my head). This is problematic if a name I was looking for was suddenly something else without notification. So even in the above mentioned scenario of someone posting a name change notice, I'm likely to miss it.

Those are just three things I can think of off the top of my head that may or may not have affected me recently.

A simple notification like "User FeyPheonixz has changed their name to FeyPhoenix" to their followers and friends would be great and eliminate most of the problems mentioned above.

Thoughts?

[Noxid]

These are fair points. Right now we don't really have a very well automated system in place for changing account names, but it's something that should be worked on.

[GreenReaper]

From experience helping to develop/roll out this feature on IB, some things to consider:

* You'll have to store usernames as user IDs in your description/journal/comment/profile/etc. markup.
** It may make sense to process these in the background, or you face a potentially lengthy downtime.
** You then need to autotranslate between them when viewing/posting/editing.
*** What happens if someone references a user by an old name?
** If you later implement full-text search, you'll need clever indexing and search processing for it to work.
*** What happens regarding searching on old names when a current name is specified, or vice versa?
* How often can people rename themselves? Or can only staff do it?
* Will you display old names? For how long? Can users control what names are displayed? Individually? By time?
** Even if you don't display them, you, the renaming user, or other users may still want redirecting to work.
* You'll need a new notification type.
** Not everyone will want watchers to be notified.
** Not every watcher wants to know, especially if everyone does it at once when you make it possible.
* What happens if someone wants to rename themselves to someone's old name? Maybe their own?
** The latter may interact with the old name display system and notifications.
* Hopefully you've been recording any past name changes and add old name records and notifications for them.
** If not, now would be a good time to start, with a consistent wording so it can be easily found later.
* Don't forget to encourage people to change usernames rather than re-register or delete accounts.

To help you estimate usage: we have 2751 old names for 2532 unique accounts over 324,000 members.

[birdhorse]

However this ends up being implemented, I would greatly support changing it so that old usernames are reserved for a length of time (should the user want to change back), and for at least that period of time all URIs associated with the old username should redirect to the new one. After all, cool URIs don't change.

[Uluri]

Upon the Comment about how DA does it, DA will change the name, BUT the link to the previous username still persists. It is just a link to re rout people to the new username instead. This also makes it so that the previous username is still unavailable for use on DA since it still keeps the previous username attached to the new username for the account. Which is also why you can't ever change your username back on DA either, despite how regrettable it might or might not be.

I like that an old username becomes available again on Weasyl. There's so many dead or abandoned usernames on FA and DA because of Name Changes. However I agree that perhaps a watcher global notification would be beneficial for users who change their names. X changed their username to Y.

- I like the option to not username hoard
- I dislike that people who watch me or have made art for me would not know my Username is changed
- Broken Links suck