It used to be possible to infer a username's previous incarnations from quotes, but this is not possible anymore.
With people able to, and taking advantage of, changing their usernames whenever they want, it's difficult to keep track of who is who.
This is hilarious.
This is why vBulletin and other systems never allowed username changes, and why I had to do them manually and write hacks to do them. And because they were demanded so much, it's why I decided not to have hacks but instead to have support for it.
Now we have it, and it's too much, and all of the reasons for not having it are more obvious.
I can add something that shows, say, the last name you had... but this wouldn't be a searchable thing, it would just be something on the profile page "previously known as ... ".
But it won't reserve old usernames, and so there exists the possibility that 100 of you could change your name to Tommy, quickly change it back... and 100 of you would have been previously known as Tommy.
Given that such a system won't reserve old usernames, what do you envision? What happens with the eBay history (I've not seen it).
This is hilarious.
This is why vBulletin and other systems never allowed username changes, and why I had to do them manually and write hacks to do them. And because they were demanded so much, it's why I decided not to have hacks but instead to have support for it.
Now we have it, and it's too much, and all of the reasons for not having it are more obvious.
I can add something that shows, say, the last name you had... but this wouldn't be a searchable thing, it would just be something on the profile page "previously known as ... ".
But it won't reserve old usernames, and so there exists the possibility that 100 of you could change your name to Tommy, quickly change it back... and 100 of you would have been previously known as Tommy.
Given that such a system won't reserve old usernames, what do you envision? What happens with the eBay history (I've not seen it).