Suggestion: make name changes ONLY available to PC supporters

since the mods and admins claim that name changes cause server stress... and there is people who frequently ask about name changes.... I thought of an idea to meet halfway....


my idea was make it available ONLY ONCE to a certain tiered PC supporter... I recommend maybe Tier3 or Tier4.....


plus it would give people more of an incentive to donate to or try to get a higher tier level of a PC supporter....

Yeah. Still stresses the server. Of course all we can do is donate more until hopefully, hopefully is the key word there we will get enough money for a new server. But a new server would cost a lot of money and probably won't come for a long time.

Team Fail said:

Even one change can cause a Database Error.

Click to expand...

really? just one can do that? WOW!!!!


can an admin or a Mod or something tell me why a name change can do that? can someone explain the logic? I don't know why it would be any different that as if a new user signs up for the first time.....

Well, many of the donators here have thousands of posts on top of blogs and such; that's a lot of data to have to alter. I understand that some people may not want to abandon their join date, post count and etc to create a new account, but you either want a different username enough to let those things go or you don't want one enough to abandon them.

justinrpg said:

really? just one can do that? WOW!!!!


can an admin or a Mod or something tell me why a name change can do that? can someone explain the logic? I don't know why it would be any different that as if a new user signs up for the first time.....

Click to expand...

Imagine all of your posts spread out around the gigantic database that is this forum.

Now the system has to trawl through all of those posts looking for your username, looking for people who have quoted you, anything that's linked to your username in this way. And then it has to change and update all those references.

On a large forum such as this it's an exceptionally high use of resources and will very likely cause the database to completely seize up under the weight of this traffic combined with normal usage by users.

When/if we are able to offer name changes again, I think the entire staff agrees it would be unrestricted. We wouldn't leave it for the supporters only.

But what Mega Shock wrote is correct. Every single time we change a name on the current database, there's a chance it'll crash it. The risk is much higher for people with more posts/VMs/blogs/whatever but the risk is there for pretty much everyone. (And the people with lowest risk are probably better off just starting a new account to get a different username anyway. :P)