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This has two problems:
- A loss of privacy. One of the biggest reasons people requested name changes is because they wanted to not be found by employer/ex/family/etc. The vast majority of people user the same username everywhere, until they determine it's a risk and need to change it. We'd be permanently linking your old identifier to your new one.
- As sign-in is via email (because you can change your username), they need a whole new email account just to get a new username.
The current situation is the best for privacy, and security.
But if people feel that this has eroded trust, as people could change their name and you cannot see the history of who they were and carry trust forward... then I can fix that, but it comes at the cost of some privacy.
- A loss of privacy. One of the biggest reasons people requested name changes is because they wanted to not be found by employer/ex/family/etc. The vast majority of people user the same username everywhere, until they determine it's a risk and need to change it. We'd be permanently linking your old identifier to your new one.
Velocio-
they need a whole new email account just to get a new username.
That's the difference between geeks and normal people I suppose; creating a new email alias is something I do for pretty much every different site which wants an email address.
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it comes at the cost of some privacy.
If it's not searchable, either here or by indexing, how much of an issue is that?
If someone wanted to find TW2, they could search for the user and not find them. They would need to already know that my new pseudonym was TW in order to link them.
I guess it would be possible to click on every single username and view the name history, or programmatically scrape the same. But if you're the sort of person that does that, you could just as easily derive all previous names from the wayback machine or Google's cache.
gbj_tester
NotThamesWater
Presumably it won't be retroactive, so if you just put a warning next to the 'change user name' input people will know that if they really want to change their ID, they will need to create a new user rather than just renaming their existing one.