9
votes
Inactive/reserved usernames
Posed this in the weekly thread and it was recommended to pose the question to the broader community.
I am a new user of this wonderful community and certainly plan on being active. It was a bit disappointing to see my preferred name registered and fully inactive (minus an introductory post 60 days ago).
Curious how the community thinks this should be handled, both in Alpha, an on into GA.
First come, first served, no takebacks for anything other than a proven sitting head of state. Anything else becomes a massive administrative overhead and possibility for complications/trolling.
Wouldn't intentionally registering usernames for known celebrities and redditors already be complicated and trolling? The admins shouldn't always refuse to take action and/or refuse to make corrections possible. Require a minimum degree of uniqueness (e.g. not just a first name), if it ever becomes a more-than-once a month thing, maybe form a team of verification volunteers.
Overall, I probably won't ever reclaim usernames. There's too much potential for confusion or privacy issues, even if an account seems to be inactive.
For example, imagine someone has a message conversation with another user, and then they both go inactive for a year. One of the usernames gets re-claimed, and the other user comes back and ends up messaging a completely different person behind the account without realizing.
In really obvious/egregious cases of squatting I may do something though, like if I saw an example of someone using a bunch of their invite codes just to register and squat on other usernames for no reasonable purpose.
Fair response, thank you.
And whoever hijacked 'Josh,' I will remain spiteful :-D.
Ha, likewise me with "Sam". The bastard!
Why not be "JoshX", where "X" is your second initial?
An admin would know.
I’m sure there’s a programtic way to do this?
Strange that you immediately jumped to the seizure of the account in question.
Is there really no other alternative to the person taking the inactive user's account? I don't think that's the right way (and I cannot see how anyone would justify invading someone's privacy like that).
I know we cannot have two users with the same username. But why is that? And can't it be changed?
This website is being built with the intention that users will acquire reputation and, as a result of that reputation, will gain moderator powers. That requires tracking each user's activity and recording which users have what powers. Therefore, there must be a unique identifier for each user. In this case, it's a personalised username, such as "Askme_about_penguins" or "Algernon_Asimov".
Of course, it's possible to use non-personalised unique identifiers, such as "#U000001" and "#U000002", for this purpose instead. And, then each user could add an alias to personalise their account. For example, you might be user #U000001, and you might create an alias "Askme_about_penguins" which displays on threads, but all internal database storage is done using "#U000001".
However, this leads into some other important reasons for having unique usernames: accountability and consistency. What if #U000002 changes their alias to "Askme_about_penguins" as well? There are then two accounts running around the site appearing as "Askme_about_penguins". Even though the activity of both accounts is being tracked separately in the database (as #U000001 and #U000002), your fellow users won't know who's who. What if #U000002 starts acting badly under the alias "Askme_about_penguins"? Your fellow users will assume that all posts by any user called "Askme_about_penguins" are by the same person. You'll be tarred with the same brush as that other account: their bad behaviour will reflect on you. The only way to distance yourself from #U000002's behaviour would be to change your alias to something else like "TheREAL_Askme_about_penguins". But then they change their alias to "TheREAL_Askme_about_penguins" and you're back where you started.
I'm already confused enough between @crius and @cirrus, and any unique tag added (like how battlenet or discord handles it) would never be something I'd remember. You could do that with a "nickname" feature on top, but that's a lot of added confusion for very little gain.
Honestly I'm not sure this is worth doing anything about. Not getting the username you like sucks, but it's not worth making the site less usable to solve.
To your edit, much like Github, it’s probably a function of renaming - not deletion.
Agree, there are potential headaches.
@Custos talked about renaming an account, rather than deleting it.
Let's imagine that you're inactive on Tildes for 6 months and then a brand new user signs up and wants to create an account called "@apoctr". Instead of handing your account over to the new users, Deimos could hypothetically rename your inactive account to "@inactive96", which would free up "@apoctr" for the new user to create.
A few months later, you come back to Tildes, sign in, and find out your account has been renamed to "@inactive96". All the history is still there, but it's just under a different name. You could apply to Deimos to re-rename your account to something else now that you're active again. Of course, you can't use "@apoctr" any more, because that's been used by someone else for the past few months. But maybe you like "@sunshine" now, so you become "@sunshine".
Extra issue: Tildes only stores the hash of an email, because the only thing they use it for is password resets. For them to send you an email, you have to request one (and know the email of the account).
Not OP, but it depends if the identifier of the account is the username itself. If not and every account is identified by an ID you can just transfer the username to another account and this new name appears on their old posts while the person that previously held the name appears as 'Deactivated account' until they choose, or not, to claim a new username.
I love Github’s approach, selfishly :-D.
Ultimately, this seems like the most likely scenario. At least while the user base is relatively low. In the future I imagine so sort of automated script would run the check as the load would be far too great for manual intervention.
If we were to do anything I'd probably just suggest something like what Xbox Live does. For those unfamiliar, they just delete accounts that have been completely inactive for 4-5 years. Making those names available again.
How would we distinguish between the first person that went inactive and the second person who reclaimed the username?
After 4 or 5 years, most people probably wouldn't even be aware of an account's previous life.
If the user is no longer active, do we need to even show a username? It could display "deleted", or maybe "deleted (formerly [username])", provided the account has been assigned to another human.