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Suggestion: Ability to change Username entirely. Through Payment!


LordSpyro
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I suggest "although it's been suggested many times I'm sure" that we have the ability to change our Username for a certain amount in Payment. And maybe have a limited amount of name changes per account.

The payment would prevent "for the most part" griefers and trolls from hiding their username (due to it would be a waste of money to change your name just so you can bug others with the account for a little longer) and the limitation of name changes per account would also play into that effect.

The thought of not being able to recongize someone for a name change can simply be fixed by ASKING THEM WHO THEY ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 I say an amount from $20 to $30 would be acceptable, and 1 change per account would be reasonable.

 

(Editing)

I'm guessing only the crabby and negative thinking users use the Second Life Forums? Judging by the comments so far.

Don't responde to this editing, it's not meant for one, just to point out the annoying careless and negative attitudes from you all.

HOWEVER. I will respond to each comment below just once, before leaving this topic alone for good.

Thanks for the replies. :)

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Your user name is what is used to link all your inventory and land to your account, and everything else that is stored information unique to your account.  There is no other identifier used.  LL would have to go through all their records to find then change the name on each entry.  The amount you are willing to pay would not come even close to compensate for the amount of work involved in the task.

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I couldnt think of a worse idea as ones user name is the only identifier in world where people can chnage everything else others see of you.

As for preventing trolls and griefer it would most likely increase that action as the troll av chnages name and gets unbanned in the systems.

 

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LordSpyro wrote:

I suggest "although it's been suggested many times I'm sure" that we have the ability to change our Username for a certain amount in Payment. And maybe have a limited amount of name changes per account.

The payment would prevent "for the most part" griefers and trolls from hiding their username (due to it would be a waste of money to change your name just so you can bug others with the account for a little longer) and the limitation of name changes per account would also play into that effect.

The thought of not being able to recongize someone for a name change can simply be fixed by ASKING THEM WHO THEY ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I say an amount from $20 to $30 would be acceptable, and 1 change per account would be reasonable.

 

 

You can change your account name for free any time you want - just create another account. You don't get to keep your no-transfer items but that can be considered the "cost."

Meanwhile, this thread and your previous one has me wondering:

Okay, what exactly did you do?

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LordSpyro wrote: [...] The thought of not being able to recongize someone for a name change can simply be fixed by ASKING THEM WHO THEY ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [...]

And trusting that they don’t lie in their answer.

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I doubt it would be that big of issue. Theres other virtual worlds or chat sites that allow the change of your username, which do not hold this issue you claim, the amount of money Second Life makes would be able to conpensate a software update or change to allow this option.

 

And before you make the comment "then use those virtual worlds" or something in that nature, I do use those worlds, I like Second Life as well, so I'm not going to leave it, I'm just suggesting an idea/ability.

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For some of us the whole issue of names is an old topic, one that has been debated almost to death.  We were here when Linden Lab dropped last names and implemented display names.  And we argued vehemently against what they were doing.  And many of the problems we foresaw came to pass. 

Linden Lab said people were exiting the sign up process at choosing their name.  And so they decided to tell people not to worry about it now, you can choose a User Name after you log in.  But again little did they see the problems that could cause.  Because many people have different aproaches to SL and its a challenge to make a one size fits all solution. 

One thing we argued for and got was the ability to see User Names.  Merchants needed this to avoid getting scammed and to be able to give customer support.  Land owners and Club Owners, etc, etc, needed it also in order to be able to deal with griefers and other Drama Llamas.  And the list goes on.

Maybe it could be a good thing if LL allowed a one time change for a fee.  It might reduce it happenning for scamming purposes.  And yes we know many people lament their name choice.  But would it be fair to those who didn't realise the implications, that choosing xoxoxTentacleGirl126xoxox as a User name would be visible to all, to charge them to change it?  Where do you draw the line?

I'm not completely against your idea but I also see other difficulties but really don't feel like writing a book now on it.  I'll leave it at I think there is a bigger picture here.

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LordSpyro wrote:

They change their name and gets unbanned in the system? Even with a name change, the system can still recognize your account number or history, so it wouldn't do anything but change the username.

This is exactly the problem.  There are NO account numbers for your account.  The user name is the sole identifier of everything connected to it.

Whether you believe it or not LL's stated reason for not allowing the changing of user names is exactly what I told you in my earlier post.  Sure they could probably come up with a solution given enough incentive.  A few years back there was a big drive to go back and allow people with only one name and new people to pick a first and last name.  They supposedly studied the idea for several months, but in the end said they couldn't do it.  Apparently they don't see any financial benefit even though some people stated they would pay a fee. 

 

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Jean Horten wrote:

Ever heard of uuids?

Think you mean key. Agents (not users) have keys, assets have UUIDs (which are also of type key). Agent key is not a UUID as it doesn't fit definition - though some resources may cloud this distinction, it becomes important when detecting dependancy.

Poor design of the rearend means agent keys are not used as Primary Keys (they may not change, but they fail ACID), and so aren't suitable.

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Freya Mokusei wrote:


Jean Horten wrote:

Ever heard of uuids?

Think you mean key. Agents (not users) have
keys
, assets have
UUIDs
(which are also of type key). Agent key is not a UUID as it doesn't fit definition - though some resources may cloud this distinction, it becomes important when detecting dependancy.

Poor design of the rearend means agent keys are not used as Primary Keys (they may not change, but they fail ACID), and so aren't suitable.

I had wondered if there was a problem with how everything was associated with an Ava like you said.

Questions arise like how would group membership be affected. How would objects deeded or shared with a group be affected.

 

eta:typo

 

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Absolute answers for effects to specific functions are difficult without a view. My skills include data visualisation and modelling but without a system of similar scale I'm guessing at how integrity errors would affect service quality (beyond 'negatively').

My assumption (based on experience of this issue in other companies) would be that group and land permissions (at least) would fail unless rewritten from the ground up, but the larger problem would be the damage done to backend reporting systems - it's likely that fixing this problem would break all associated performance and other monitoring tools along the line. This would leave service techs and QoS/QA teams dead in the water.

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Freya Mokusei wrote:


Jean Horten wrote:

Ever heard of uuids?

Think you mean key. Agents (not users) have
keys
, assets have
UUIDs
(which are also of type key). Agent key is not a UUID as it doesn't fit definition - though some resources may cloud this distinction, it becomes important when detecting dependancy.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:LSL_Key

"A key is a universal unique identifier in Second Life for anything mostly, be it a prim, avatar, texture, etc.

You may see key referred to as UUID, UID, "Asset UUID", or "asset-ID".

The key itself is formed of hexadecimal characters [0-9a-f] and each section of the key is broken up by dashes (for a total amount of 36 characters)."

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlRequestAgentData

"Function: key llRequestAgentData( key id, integer data );

Requests data about agent id. When data is available the dataserver event will be raised

Returns the handle (a key) for the dataserver event when it is raised.

• key  id     –  avatar UUID"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier

"In its canonical form, a UUID is represented by 32 lowercase hexadecimal digits, displayed in five groups separated by hyphens, in the form 8-4-4-4-12 for a total of 36 characters (32 alphanumeric characters and four hyphens)."

 

Thus it appears to me that also the agent "Key" is a UUID.

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A change to the username is a tough problem. LL has changed some on occasion and still will, for a few circumstances like Lindens who left on friendly terms, ordinary users whose names were reported as ToS violations, and a handful of people LL considered to be VIPs.

The basic SL system can handle these changes fine. Land, groups and objects all reference the number, so that stuff doesn't break.

There are some glaring exceptions for user-facing stuff. L$ transaction histories use the legacy names, so there are potential difficulties for merchants and their customers. Also, there is an enormous legacy of inworld scripts like security systems, tip jars and vendors, games and so on that rely on those names. Some of the ancillary SL services like JIRA, the wiki and this forum use the names. And of course, there will be numerous third party services that have relied on LL's long term policy that usernames are generally constant.

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Coby Foden wrote:

Thus it appears to me that also the agent "Key"
is
a UUID.


Thanks - a small element of the UUID definition had escaped me:-

"In this context the word unique should be taken to mean "practically unique" rather than "guaranteed unique". Since the identifiers have a finite size, it is possible for two differing items to share the same identifier."

I see this discussion talking at cross-purposes. There is a difference between "identifying information" and "unique identifier" that SL confuses in the same way. It's still my understanding that the 'UUID' granted to the avatar is not suitable for unique identification from a data integrity point of view.

My mistake in not spotting the confusion earlier.


Cerise Sorbet wrote:

The basic SL system can handle these changes fine. Land, groups and objects all reference the number, so that stuff doesn't break.


This is interesting, and contradicts some (admittedly old) information of mine. I was fairly sure on objects and land ownership, but not interrogated groups enough to be sure. Do you know for sure if land access/ban lists use the keys - not just translated for viewer display? Not that I'm doubting, it just messes with my mental model.

It still appears that there's an entrenched unwillingness to perform this action except in special cases. Accounting and integrity seem the obvious explanations, or perhaps it's just some unwritten rule.

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Yeah, you can look thru the messages and the LSL function and see that parcel access all works off UUIDs.  Same for groups.

There are some dialogs that omit the numbers, which is why for example it is not possible to mute group invites yet (mute list is all keys too), but the underlying system doesn't really rely ion the names, those are filled in at view time (which is the root cause of the infamous Loading... things we have seen over the years, the names have to be fetched and filled in).

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Freya Mokusei wrote:


Coby Foden wrote:

Thus it appears to me that also the agent "Key"
is
a UUID.


Thanks - a small element of the
 had escaped me:-

"In this context the word unique should be taken to mean "practically unique" rather than "guaranteed unique". Since the identifiers have a finite size, it is possible for two differing items to share the same identifier."

I see this discussion talking at cross-purposes. There is a difference between "identifying information" and "unique identifier" that SL confuses in the same way. It's still my understanding that the 'UUID' granted to the avatar is not suitable for unique identification from a data integrity point of view.

That UUID definition continues like this:

"The identifier size and generation process need to be selected so as to make this sufficiently improbable in practice. Anyone can create a UUID and use it to identify something with reasonable confidence that the same identifier will never be unintentionally created by anyone to identify something else. Information labeled with UUIDs can therefore be later combined into a single database without needing to resolve identifier (ID) conflicts."

 

Anyway, I have no idea whether or not Linden Lab use, inside Second Life, a method to "resolve identifier (ID) conflicts". I would consider it strange if they didn't. Why to have a UUID which would not be unique inside Second Life? I tend to think that all avatar UUIDs are unique, the same way as the usernames are.

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