Option to change username

[Faye Mercury]

hello, i am new to the community forums so forgive me if this has been stated before (i searched beforehand to no avail but i may be missing something) and also if this is incorrect placement please feel free to move this thread!

i've been a member of secondlife for over 10 years and had a few different accounts, with the changes and whatnot happening i decided now would be a good time to come back. one of the main issues i've had for awhile now with secondlife is the fact that you cannot change your username. i know im not the only one who thinks this, i was recently talking to my girlfriend about it too. it forces people to commit to old usernames because most of the items which have real money spent on them are non transferable. this is especially a problem for people who realize theyd now rather be anonymous, or (if you'll bear with my social justice-ness) for people who transitioned gender and no longer want a name associated with their old one. or just for people who no longer feel connected to it for whatever reason.

so im not looking for an answer to a question as much as im looking for a response/action taken from the linden team. my recommendation is that you put a time limit on it, deviantart recently did this so that you can only change your username once every 6 months. this would prevent people changing their identity too rapidly, you could also have old usernames push through to new ones to prevent confusion in those looking for old members (and prevent impersonation in some cases), again something which deviantart did. username changes are considered a basic feature offered by most modern game and social media interfaces and would be in linden labs best interest business-wise. please let us change our usernames! i know it would be a lot of work but some of us would gladly pay money for it. thank you!

[Ethan Paslong]

10 minutes ago, rajahni said:

im looking for a response/action taken from the linden team.

if you want a official response you'r at the wrong place, this is a public forum.

Lindens rarely come here, and if they do it's even more rare for such specific questions that would need such change in programming.

If you want to pay for it... what's the difference in costs for making a new account? you could start allover, no history, totally fresh.

[Faye Mercury]

12 minutes ago, Ethan Paslong said:

if you want a official response you'r at the wrong place, this is a public forum.

Lindens rarely come here, and if they do it's even more rare for such specific questions that would need such change in programming.

If you want to pay for it... what's the difference in costs for making a new account? you could start allover, no history, totally fresh.

thanks for letting me know they dont check here regularly, but this doesn't help me unfortunately. the difference is the amount id be paying for a name change vs. the amount i'd be losing in items that i already paid for (not to mention the hassle of repurchasing everything). i've spent quite a bit on this account and i'd like to keep my inventory. do you know a better way to get in contact with them? i'm willing to forward this to them as i feel it's important and would really like to get in touch. regardless i think a forum post is useful because it allows me to get in touch with others who are having similar issues so that we can have an open discussion about it.

Edited April 25, 2018 by rajahni

[Cindy Evanier]

As far as I know feature requests are to be filed here https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?

and following from this work is being done on the ability to change names.  There are a few posts on these changes around the forums.  It is happening but no details, timescale or cost yet

 

[Faye Mercury]

3 minutes ago, Cindy Evanier said:

As far as I know feature requests are to be filed here https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?

and following from this work is being done on the ability to change names.  There are a few posts on these changes around the forums.  It is happening but no details, timescale or cost yet

 

thank you very much! i wasnt aware of this. ill be reading more into it and keeping up to date on it it now. ill alert my friends as well. ill try to submit my ideas through this if it doesnt seem like theyve been suggested there before.

[LittleMe Jewell]

4 hours ago, rajahni said:

thank you very much! i wasnt aware of this. ill be reading more into it and keeping up to date on it it now. ill alert my friends as well. ill try to submit my ideas through this if it doesnt seem like theyve been suggested there before.

Here is what we know so far about the upcoming ability to change usernames:

- There will be a fee, though we do not yet know how much, nor do we know if there will be limits on how often you can do it. 
- There will be a list of last names to choose from and you will pick a first name of your choosing as long as the first-name.last-name combo is unique. 
- The list of last names will change periodically, like they did in the olden days. 
- Any existing last names will not be come back into play. 
- Once a name has been used, it will forever be associated with that avatar and thus cannot be used by anyone else ever. 
- No word on whether or not someone will be able to revert to one of their previous usernames. 
- LL will maintain a history list and there will be at least some sort of searching mechanism -- definitely the ability to search an old name and get the current username for that avatar, but maybe not be able to pull up a current name and get a list of any/all old names. 
- They are also creating a scripting command to do the lookup of UUID from a name because the avatar's UUID will not change and that is what things like security systems need to change to using (rather than using names).

Finally, we do not know exactly when this will be available because they have to finish up some backend changes that this is dependent on - though it is supposed to be coming THIS YEAR.

Edited April 25, 2018 by LittleMe Jewell

[Nalates Urriah]

On 4/25/2018 at 12:07 PM, rajahni said:

thank you very much! i wasnt aware of this. ill be reading more into it and keeping up to date on it it now. ill alert my friends as well. ill try to submit my ideas through this if it doesnt seem like theyve been suggested there before.

What you talking about is a change in the system the engineers would need to implement. The way that type of information is provided is via the JIRA, a bug reporting system. Bug reports have a subcategory Feature Request.

There is information in the forum here about how to best write a Feature Request.

[Lindal Kidd]

I see a bit of a logical contradiction in your complaint, rahjani...

You say, correctly, that after spending a lot of time and effort, and usually money, in developing an avatar, a person feels "committed" to that avatar, since most of its inventory is not transferable to a new user account.

But you also cite gender transition as a reason to want to change one's name...from, say, "BobTheHunk" to "CynthiaSexpot".  If one is creating a new avatar of a different gender than one's primary user name, there's not a whole lot of inventory that's going to be useful anyway...so it should not be too much trouble to simply create a whole new user account.

Which is not to say that I don't agree with you.  The current dual Display Name/Username system is seriously flawed, as was the old Firstname+Lastname username-only system.  Hopefully LL will come up with a Better Way later this year.

[Nalates Urriah]

The naming system and how it will change seems to be influenced by the opportunity for added cash flow. It may have taken that to justify the return to first-last names.

The inventory being assigned to an account with a single avatar creates some interesting challenges.The result is people have avatars/accounts for specific purposes. Generally there is a single avatar with the main (big) inventory. Certainly so in my case.

For Sansar the Lindens talked about having inventory tied to an account with multiple avatars. They would be able to share from a common inventory. I follow Sansar, but not closely. So, I don't know how that is working out.

There are problems with using that idea in Second Life. What would sharing inventory among multiple avatars do to sales of stuff? I have a female Alt. She is the step child that has few shoes and clothes as most of my spending is for my main avatar. But, I do spend some on her that I would not if I could share inventory.

I also have a male Alt. I spend more on him. His wearing female clothes doesn't work for me. He's for being macho and trying out the really dumb pickup lines I hear. I'm curious, so its does this ever rEaLy work? 

But, non-gender identifiable stuff I would definitely share. Think guns, swords, furniture, vehicles...

So, a change in how inventory works and accounts connect or don't affects Linden cash flow and that affects the longevity of SL. So, I don't expect to see a change in this area.

[Faye Mercury]

gender transition is not as clean cut as some of you have made it out to be, the trans people i know actually used female avatars before they transitioned as they were experimenting with ideas so itd just be matching the name to the persona which had already emerged. also many items (in my inventory at least) are unisex, so i still consider this money lost. but yes, it was an emotional response moreso than a logical one at the time. regardless, thank you all for your responses!

im not very immersed in secondlife culture so im coming very much from a place of trying to get new modern features and accessibility, potentially for interest from a new generation. as well, i know a few different people personally distressed by inability to change their username regardless of gender dysphoria so very glad to learn it is intended to be implemented. i still need to learn how to use the JIRA/bug report system and look at whats been stated before i make my suggestion directly.

personally i like my username being a single word, i would love to see the 'Resident' suffix dropped for those who received one word usernames though. it takes me out of it to see 'rajahni Resident' inworld, even moreso with the variation of caps. it also might be nice to get an option for people to freely fix the capitalization in their usernames for no charge (personally i like all lowercase but i think some people regret it haha), ive seen multiple games and social medias offer this as well.

as for the shared inventory, that is something i would personally love. i am the type of person who doesnt multi-account because i like keeping everything i paid for. surprise, i am poor! but seriously i am just not used to treating purchases this way, i like to hold onto everything so that when the time arises i can use it. it would give me more incentive to toy with different characters if i didnt have to repeatedly buy the same items. and just because something is in your inventory to call upon at your whims, doesnt mean you really have to afterall. :]

[CdTanya]

Has anymore work been done on this ?? i know when i first joined i really was thinking cd as celtic diva and i coudlnt get just tanya as my username  ugh  life has been rough in secondlife but still have met so many wonderful people

[Nalates Urriah]

There is work going on. And there are some projects running behind schedule. I suspect those are taking the manpower away from the names project.

[Lindal Kidd]

Tanya, if the "Cd" is causing you problems, have you at least chosen a Display Name?  Maybe make the meaning of Cd explicit..."Tanya CelticDiva" for example.  Or Tanya Cadmium.  Then you have a reply if some insensitive goon claims you are a Cross Dresser.

[JordaniaDior]

So what is the status of this, bringing back last names?  Does anyone have any information?

[LittleMe Jewell]

41 minutes ago, JordaniaDior said:

So what is the status of this, bringing back last names?  Does anyone have any information?

Keep an eye on the blogs and you'll know as much as we do - which right now is 'nothing new':
https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/

 

[Chic Aeon]

On 4/25/2018 at 11:55 AM, rajahni said:

the difference is the amount id be paying for a name change vs. the amount i'd be losing in items that i already paid for (not to mention the hassle of repurchasing everything).

Note that the new name change is simply THAT === changing the name. The avatar identification number stays the same though any name changes -- hence The Labs recommendation long ago for script folks to start using the avatar identification number instead of names.

As to limiting the amount of times one can change their names, that seems unlikely since the last that we officially heard, the name change charge was going to be in the area of (not decided on at that time yet) $35 US dollars.   So it certainly seems like this will be a money maker for The Lab :D. 

 

EDIT: Well "bad word" a necro thread.  My response was to the OP LOL.  

Edited March 12, 2019 by Chic Aeon