Honestly this idea, while half baked has slight merit. Perhaps we could implement something like Bulbagarden and code some sort of plug-in that allows you to link accounts together. This way, posts from the old account can be credited (numerically) to the new account, as well as emblems, infractions, and other statistics, such as VM/Blog count, usergroup and more. (Yes this means supporters wouldn't have to re-donate to get supporter status on a new account, staff alts would have staff viewing/posting permissions...but wouldn't necessarily need to have staff powers.)
Rather than going through the database to change user names in posts, ect...just link accounts together, it would only need to consult the old account data once, add the new account data and store it into the new account data. This could be done without a need for a name change thread, and I don't think it'd require as much stress on the database backend. (as you're only importing profile data, not changing the username on every post/PM/VM they've entered into the database. Furthermore, linking accounts could merely point to the new account with an entry in the statistics showing what accounts it's linked to.)
Of course you don't delete the old account or change any of the data related to it. It's a simple copy function.
If you don't like the idea of copying the data, perhaps rigging up some sort of pointer to the old account data? This could be done at registration and not be available after then...once you've linked your old account to the new one, you can't link another one to the new and linked account to prevent long pointer chains that might kill the DB. Additionally a rule could be implemented so that if you misspell your user name at registration, as long as you've made NO POSTS, that you can PM an admin for ONE minor user name change.
(of course the link mechanism in bulbagarden isn't nearly as extensive as this concept is, but it could save a lot of back-end stress if someone could gather enough coders to quickly and properly implement the idea)
