literature

About changing names

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Literature Text

So you want to change your name?


... it's all virtual, my friend!


What if...?


When the facility of changing one's name doesn't exist, only workarounds can be used. These include, for instance, create another account. Unfortunately the latter has a lot of downsides, among which losing all the faves and page views. Also moving one's deviation from one account to another is proved to be a pain in the neck to say the least. There are others of course.


But how?


One possible implementation exists, which is really simple for the staff to feature. Most of all it doesn't have the downsides of renaming accounts. First off, technical: renaming accounts requires a cleverly crafted SQL statement that renames account ID's throughout the tables... the cascading features do not exist or haven't been used. It requires a lot of resources and is doomed to at best impede the system performance and usability. Second, social downsides: what about art theft (though I hate this term, let's not digress), which becomes easier if people change their name right before "stealing"... There are other downsides which rely on the sole fact that the initial identity is lost for the new one.

But do we really need renaming accounts at all?

My suggestion is the following: add support for aliases.

How would aliases solve the problem?


Suppose you, DA staff, allow all of your users (about ten million, right?) for one alias and this alias can be used just like any other login name, i.e.:

:bulletblue: logging on with an alias
:bulletblue: the possibility to use an alias :dev<alias>: or :icon<alias>: just like :dev<name>: or :icon<name>: respectively
:bulletblue: the alias (instead of the login name) can be displayed on the profile page, which requires an additional option in our «Identification» settings page.

Aliases have the following advantages:

:bulletblue: the initial login name still exists, no one can then take it even inadvertently;
:bulletblue: there's always a possibility to link an alias to a real name, no fake identity is then possible;
:bulletblue: checking for existing aliases remains possible with minor edits of the login name creation code;
:bulletblue: alias changes can still be logged down internally to eventually track abusers;
:bulletblue: minimal impact on system performance: only a new table with a one-to-one link to the alias is needed; that relation might even become one-to-many if the staff allows for using more than one alias;
:bulletblue: revert to your initial login name is still possible: remove your alias.

Here are my additional bonuses:

:bulletgreen: in our Identity settings, provide one option to display our alias instead of our login name (doing nothing leaves the system unchanged);
:bulletgreen: in our Identity settings, provide an option to append our initial login name next to our avatar (this option is disabled if the previous one is unchecked); if that option is checked, the text next to our avatar becomes for instance:

AliasMaster a.k.a JAMsEye
Carpe Diem



Additional features


:bulletgreen: the number of aliases may be limited to one or extended to a few more, depending on how complex you, the staff want it to be ;). Currently, IMHO, only one is enough.
:bulletgreen: you might restrict aliases to premium members if you want to get somewhat paid to implement this change. That's up to you.

I hope this detailed explanation makes its way towards implementation. Please don't hesitate to ask or suggest if you feel the need to.

Cheers.
This is an elaborate version of my comment to «Paid name changes», which I spotted recently. There's a need for changing names in every system. Even in real life the opportunity exists. In a virtual system like Deviant Art or any computer system, name changes can be implemented in a rather easy way.

The red line is that it's all virtual. I believe in a virtual system these kinds of changes should remain free of charge.
© 2011 - 2024 JAMsEye
Comments6
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Pencil-Stencil's avatar
hmm.. not sure i follow why this would come in handy? i know, comes out of desire (or necessity) to change the user name. since changing a user name isn't such a good option (who would know it's you unless you alert the media :XD: ) how is this an advantage? i mean.. is the point only about having 2 names, the "doomed" one which you can't change and the cool new one which is there only because you thought it's cool? :)