By the by, a few ideas that are bouncing around in my head right now from the feedback so far:
Regarding the name change frequency, I think I'll make it 6-monthly. I think the arguments for 6 months are stronger than those for 4 months, and the poll indicates that the majority of people would prefer 6 months (51.81% of the vote).
Regarding name hoarding, I don't think it's feasible to stop people from "reserving" names without having a major overhaul of how we handle alt accounts, which isn't something that's on the table right now. However I know that I don't wish to facilitate this, so I'm not going to do account "swaps" any more; peoples' "reservation" accounts will have either the requested username + some random numbers or be deleted altogether, probably the former. I might see if I can also stop recently changed usernames from being taken immediately by their old users, but I don't know how this is possible.
For supporter name change perks, I'm not going to introduce anything for Crystal supporters but I think I'll do something somewhat unanticipated and grant Platinum supporters (almost) unlimited name changes at any time. It's pretty bold, but there are so few of you and you've donated so much that I don't think it'll get out of hand.
I'll think about these some more, though, and would appreciate any further feedback that you guys have.
Regarding the name change frequency, I think I'll make it 6-monthly. I think the arguments for 6 months are stronger than those for 4 months, and the poll indicates that the majority of people would prefer 6 months (51.81% of the vote).
Regarding name hoarding, I don't think it's feasible to stop people from "reserving" names without having a major overhaul of how we handle alt accounts, which isn't something that's on the table right now. However I know that I don't wish to facilitate this, so I'm not going to do account "swaps" any more; peoples' "reservation" accounts will have either the requested username + some random numbers or be deleted altogether, probably the former. I might see if I can also stop recently changed usernames from being taken immediately by their old users, but I don't know how this is possible.
For supporter name change perks, I'm not going to introduce anything for Crystal supporters but I think I'll do something somewhat unanticipated and grant Platinum supporters (almost) unlimited name changes at any time. It's pretty bold, but there are so few of you and you've donated so much that I don't think it'll get out of hand.
I'll think about these some more, though, and would appreciate any further feedback that you guys have.