# One-Shot Username changes?



## Lea.Tigris (Sep 17, 2016)

I know the site admins have probably been pestered day in, day out about being allowed to change usernames on the FA site.
But I am curious to see if a possible one-shot change could be enabled? 
Like you only get one chance to change or update your username, or a single change per year? Rather then people being able to change it willy-nilly on a daily basis.

Is it possible? I know so many people would appreciate it as making new accounts and trying to remind followers to re-watch you is a pain.


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## quoting_mungo (Sep 18, 2016)

Mainsite? Might happen at some point in the undetermined future, but not anytime soon - the site was originally built with some poor design decisions that won't easily let such a feature get implemented. We know it's a much desired feature, it's just something that'd be rather difficult to implement, and not a development priority at this point.


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## Toby_Morpheus (Sep 18, 2016)

From my experience running a few servers on my own, without a name changing ability implemented in whatever you're running, whether game server or forum, the only way to change names is to actually shut the whole server down to edit the database tables by hand.
Not sure how these work, but I'm guessing it might be a similar thing.


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## Lea.Tigris (Sep 18, 2016)

quoting_mungo said:


> Mainsite? Might happen at some point in the undetermined future, but not anytime soon - the site was originally built with some poor design decisions that won't easily let such a feature get implemented. We know it's a much desired feature, it's just something that'd be rather difficult to implement, and not a development priority at this point.



Alrighty! Thank you for responding!


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## Gem-Wolf (Sep 19, 2016)

Prometheus_Fox said:


> From my experience running a few servers on my own, without a name changing ability implemented in whatever you're running, whether game server or forum, the only way to change names is to actually shut the whole server down to edit the database tables by hand.
> Not sure how these work, but I'm guessing it might be a similar thing.



Damn! that's full on


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## jayhusky (Sep 20, 2016)

Prometheus_Fox said:


> From my experience running a few servers on my own, without a name changing ability implemented in whatever you're running, whether game server or forum, the only way to change names is to actually shut the whole server down to edit the database tables by hand.
> Not sure how these work, but I'm guessing it might be a similar thing.



While it could be somewhat true in FA's case, the reason username changes aren't supported is that the site relies on using the username of the user to identify and cross reference data across the tables, instead of a userid number. Many years ago when the same question was put forward to yak, he responded that any change of a username in the current database would case cascading issues within the database, as there could be literally thousands of instances in which the username appears, from comments to journals, submissions, notes and much more, and with changing some and now all of the instances, it would cause the database to be pointing to accounts that don't exist.

Take into account that FA likely runs the following as seperate tables, and you'll see that the likely many instances would be hard to track down and change by hand.


Account Info
User-Profile Content
Journals
Shouts
Submissions
Favourites
Notes
Comments
Watch List (Is Watching)

Watch List (Watched By)
The feature was speculated for inclusion in the now abandoned Ferrox update, and has since been mentioned again in the Phoenix update. Although dev seems to be quiet on Phoenix at the current time as no updates have been made in some time.


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