Changing one's "username"

[craigconstantine]

Continuing the discussion from Heavy Hitter Sports: Pre-The Legend Lives On:

tl;dr: This turned out to be vastly more complicated than I’d expected. I’ve reached out to the Discourse support team about it.

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wait wat?

There’s a 3-day grace window in which you could have changed your username. (Look! A new configuration knob I’d not know about… *sigh*) After three days, it prevents all users from changing their username.

Ok, easy! …I can just change that setting to a big number and then Mark can changes his . . .

oh, that’s bad…

One’s username turns out to be very deeply stapled to your identity in the system. If you change your username, you disown everything you’ve done. Your posts would remain written-by the no-longer-used “markhoch”, and the new “hoagie” (or whatever you changed to) would be a new user who begins anew.

So now I see why you’d want that three-day-window kept small; Because of the train-wreck-disownership I described above, you [as a new user] don’t want to go very far before you disown everything you’ve done.

For added complexity, I don’t know what that would do to the subscription system either.

@JuleKucera @Hoagie

[craigconstantine]

oh.

Turns out that I can change your username at any time.

boop you are now @Hoagie

…and it did everything correctly. You’re posts are still owned by you, etc.

[Hoagie (Mark Hochgesang)]

Craig, thanks. You’re more powerful than you initially thought.

[craigconstantine]

Thanks for sticking with it through the bumps in the road!