[Moonboot]

The idea has most likely been tossed around before but I think it would be a good idea if pbn allowed for their members to change their usernames instead of members just creating new accounts. I know people grow tired of their usernames and make new accounts, but why not just allow the user to change their name? Would this take a great deal of modification and work to the website? There is, however, the question of legitimacy bst feedback with a name change that might be a problem. However, if the only thing that's changing is the name, then the feedback towards the user is still valid. Maybe pbn could run name changes like microsoft, charging people ms points (in this case a fee) to change their name, this might evn generate revenue for pbn as well. I know other sites allow name changes, even ebay allows it, and I feel it would be a good improvement to pbn if this change was made.

[Pump Scout]

IIRC, there's some issue with the amount of time it takes the database to deal with that sort of thing. I believe the phrase was "an unacceptable amount of downtime" for it. Part of the joy of having a forum this large, I suppose.

[St.Geezy]

(having owned a database) it takes just as long for the database to change your avatar or signature.

[Kyle]

Originally Posted by St.Geezy

(having owned a database) it takes just as long for the database to change your avatar or signature.

Yeah.. so you're wrong. In a properly normalized database, you'd have a schema where the user and post table relationship is such that the post table (where posts live) keys (based on userid) off of the user table so that changing a username is as simple as updating a single row in the user table, and bam you're done.

However, due to the way vBulletin is designed, they chose to denormalize the database to avoid having to join on the user table each time you view a thread (to determine everyone's usernames). Therefore, they store a copy of the username in the post table in each row (post), as well as the user table.

Therefore, in order to change a user's username, you have to scan every row in the post table, to ensure that every post record's username field is updated to reflect the new username.

This sounds ok, until you realize that not only do we have nearly 62,000,000 posts to go through, but that we've split the post table into 10 tables for performance reasons.

Coupled with the fact that in order to do a name change, you must do a full table scan and update each post a user has, which requires locking the post table for writes, you end up hanging the entire site and inconveniencing everyone for the amount of time it takes to run this query (or 11 queries in our case). I haven't actually attempted it since the last time we did a hardware on the primary database server, but last time we tried it would effectively take the entire site down for 5-10 minutes.

..all to change a user's username.

[DaveEllis]

So...when can I change mine then?

[Rob66 V2]

been suggested before, been asked for by users in TTMA, the same answer will stay the same answer. No.

/thread

[Moonboot]

Thanks for clearing it up, just thought I would ask.