[paintking22]

why not?

[pballin16]

The problem isn't that we're mean and don't want to let you change it. It's the fact that the website is rendered unusable for an extended amount of time when changing a username.

[Team Misfit]

A forum I used to be on it was 5.00 to change your name and the site was perffectly fine.. cheap software that PBN uses lol

Jk :p

[gamer565]

Originally Posted by Team Misfit

A forum I used to be on it was 5.00 to change your name and the site was perffectly fine.. cheap software that PBN uses lol

Jk :p

Does that site have over half million user and 3 million threads?

[Team Misfit]

Originally Posted by gamer565

Does that site have over half million user and 3 million threads?

Probably way more than that honestly.

[Rob66]

not to mention it would make it easier for scammers to continue scamming people

[gamer565]

Originally Posted by Team Misfit

Probably way more than that honestly.

What's the website?

[cww516]

Originally Posted by Team Misfit

cheap software that PBN uses lol

Jk :p

From what I remember of Kyle's explanation, that's not far off. Something about how the username is stored in the post, rather than a unique ID number or something, so to change the name, they'd have to go through every post on the board looking for the existing name. VB is doinitrong.

[rubenpr79]

[da_mink]

Originally Posted by Team Misfit

A forum I used to be on it was 5.00 to change your name and the site was perffectly fine.. cheap software that PBN uses lol

Jk :p

Not so much the software is cheap, PBN runs on a custom version of the v3 V-BULLITON and because of that is stuck either losing things it has spent years implementing or continue on with legacy forum software.

Best thing to do would be complain to crowdgather.

[Worr, the wee tot. (Banned)]

They could always just ban your current account, let you create a new one, and then roll back the join date to when your first account was created. Still a lot of moderator/admin work, and since they wouldn't be seeing a penny from your $5, I don't see this happening.

[Racso]

buy the site from crowdgather. I'm sure you could change your user then...

[MiniMaster423]

Originally Posted by Worr, the wee tot.

They could always just ban your current account, let you create a new one, and then roll back the join date to when your first account was created. Still a lot of moderator/admin work, and since they wouldn't be seeing a penny from your $5, I don't see this happening.

Then your missing feedback and you would have to completely setup your account again. Also you would lose your posts

[da_mink]

Originally Posted by Racso

buy the site from crowdgather. I'm sure you could change your user then...

They "are not intrested in selling at this time"

[Racso]

Originally Posted by da_mink

They "are not intrested in selling at this time"

Companies are ALWAYS interested in selling... the price is the question...

[Moonboot]

I'm sure a bunch of people, myself included, have been waiting for this for years and maybe with crowd gather it might happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath. And let's say PBN did let users pay to change their name, it would cost that person a LOT more than $5.00 due to the loss of revenue they would incur resulting from the downtime of the site. The ads don't run, PBN doesn't make money. Simple as that.

[John]

We've been offered $100 for a single name change and turned it down guys. Sorry, but the answer is still "no."

I'm sorry, but we currently do not offer users the ability to change their usernames. The size of the PbNation database prevents us from changing usernames without interrupting site operations for an unacceptable period of time.

You are free to create a new user account but please keep in mind your feedback is not transferable.



More technical answer:

Originally Posted by Kyle

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 full table scan and update such as this 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.

[DarkEnigma]

$500 to have Kyle's name.