Show "nickname" in forum ?

[morrisdan1]

Hi,

Is there a way I could have a different display name or nickname to be used in the forum ? Other than just using my login username ?

Thanks !

[Bob]

Hello Daniel,

No that would not be a possibility here in our forums and if you want a different username you would need to log out and signup with a different username as that is what will be displayed for any posts you make.

-Bob

[esc]

A very long time ago (2000) I asked the same question as I had registered with my full name and realized that most people here used a nickname. Re-registering would have had the disadvantage to loose all the accumulated data (post count, registration date, points, etc.). A kind soul then (was it you Bob? :)) just opened the DB and changed my name from ‘Erich Schreiber’ to ‘esc’.

Erich

[Jeff]

It's pretty easy to change a user's username in vbulletin - you just login to the admin cp, edit user, and type the new name over the old one. But I too have mixed feelings about updating a user's username. One complication comes when a user changes their name from "Bob" to "something else." Then any posts that follow the originals and include "thanks Bob" or "What do you mean in your post Bob" or "I don't agree with your point Bob because x y z" are confusing to those who read them later on and say "who is Bob? which post?" Changing user's usernames can thus "corrupt" the train of thought of the archived forum knowledgebase a bit for future readers.

[MarkM]

If a user joined with a nick-username and then signs as Bob, I always try to reply giving reference to the users signed name.
Bob is much more personable than Blk2003.
If I am quoting a users' post in another thread/post I will use the quote function / and maybe also the users signed first name.

However, one point is that if the username has been changed, then the old username in the Quote will probably still show (I think), though it should still link to the users quoted post.

This issue probably has more to do with a FQ policy rather than the ease with which it is possible to change a username for someone.

[Bob]

Just to clarify Erich's post.

We have, on a few occasions, manually changed the username for a site owner, when requested from the Service desk.

These have generally been in cases where they used a domain name for the username and then changed the domain they host here, or a full name and became concerned about privacy issues.

These are handled on a case by case basis, just as editing older posts are handled.

However Jeff and Mark have valid points in regarding changing the username (which is the same as the login name).

-Bob

[kitchin]

That go me thinking, vBulletin must give users an ID number - you sort of need an invariant field if you're going to allow changing names. Jeff, did you know you are user #1000? Click "Jeff" and look at the URL's!

So that solves the identity problem for the computer, but not for the people reading the forum.

Same thing comes up with item codes in a shopping cart. The public sees those, so the merchant may want to change them. But various unforeseen side effects come up, like in tracking old orders or keeping stats on sales. Otherwise, you don't actually need an invariant field, but it's helpful. I did it the other way until I got tired of worrying about bullet-proofing the edit functions.

[Monty]

I personally have found changing usernames to be very server intensive with vB. I almost always spikes the server to the point it can be seen on the server load readouts.

[MarkM]

Surely that can't be right Monty.
The only thing that is changed is a few letters.
Nothing else gets changed.

Now, I know that in using a 3rd party integrated gallery application that I need to separately rescan it's database to change the username in the photos uploaded there ...

Still, why would changing a users forum username take any more processing power than changing a users location?

[Monty]

Every post they made has to be re named, every post in the database has to be checked to see if they posted it, and so forth. A large forum approaching a million posts and 25,000 users will go through quite the cycle to rename one user that has a lot of posts. Even a user with few or no posts takes quite a bit of processing. I have seen it on my load graphs and seen it take quite a bit of time to make happen. I don't allow it anymore, and tell them to re register using their new username. I allow user titles to be changed by the users, and that's much more server friendly and would solve the problem of the original question.

[Jeff]

I changed the username of a user who had around 1800 posts last week on a forum that has 20,999 members but only 144,758 posts total - it happened within a couple seconds and didn't seem to be any problem in terms of server load though I would look more closely at it if I were doing it every hour vs. once in a great while.

[MarkM]

A large forum approaching a million posts and 25,000 users will go through quite the cycle to rename one user that has a lot of posts.

Okay well the reason for the spike may be in the details.

AdminCP > Update counters > Update Usernames:

? > Update Usernames
This will update user names everywhere they occur on your forums. This may need to be done after changing a user's name in the Admin CP.

Number of users to process per cycle: 1000

? > Number of forums to process per cycle
Here you can specify the number of forums / users / threads / posts / attachments to be processed at a time. This number may need to be set lower for extremely large forums because of time out concerns.

My site is much smaller and it processes faster than you can say _done_.

However in a practical non techsavvy view, I see this as a minor request from a user, and which I've had very few but reasonable number of requests from our members over the years.

I don't want think that in time I may have to do as you and refuse this request for our members, so at some time I may make the suggestion to vB that they improve the methodology of changing/updating a username.
It's certainly posible to perform queries at lightning speed that are of equal or greater complexity.

Cheers,
Mark