Discord Users Will Have To Rename Themselves Soon
Discord Users Will Have To Rename Themselves Soon
The Hunger Games: Discord Edition.
Discord is making a big change ahead: your username will soon be rendered obsolete as the app is switching to a new username system that basically mimics what’s already available in other major social media platforms. The suffixed 4-digit number, originally served as a differentiator (or ‘discriminators’ as Discord calls it) between same IDs, will be removed over time.
“This became technical debt that we didn’t address adequately,” Discord Co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote in the blog post. “Our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.”
It turns out that the current system, which is case-sensitive and includes the aforementioned 4-digit discriminator has proven difficult for users to share their IDs for adding friends. “PhIBI#8936” and “PHibi#8936”, despite being the same name, are not the same ID, which confused a lot of people (almost half of all friend requests failed to connect as a result of this).
In its place will be a new naming system similar to how you use Twitter or Instagram: a unique ID that contains only small alphabets (a-z), numbers (0-9), periods (.) and underscores (_). The new ID will not replace anything other than the original ID – so your server display names will still continue to function even after the ID change. Though, a new ‘Display Name’ will slot in between server nickname and user IDs, as a replacement for users that used non-alphanumeric characters in their existing IDs (such as CJK characters).
The rollout should begin in the coming weeks, and to avoid a literal Hunger Games situation, Discord is rolling this out slowly and priority will be given to the oldest Discord users. Users will just have to wait until their turn arrives – so if you are among the earliest Discord users, you should be able to update your IDs soon. (New users, just pray that your name won’t be taken before your turn arrives.)
Pokdepinion: Oh bummer, but I guess that’s something they had to do.
