We have a policy where admins can inherit completely abandoned, inactive and empty usernames (no karma, activity, etc). I was lucky this username met all the requirements. When I inherited the username, the cake day was reset.
Huh. Are there any reason why this isn’t applied to regular people too, like basically have a lottery for usernames that have been inactive for x amount of years?
There's probably a much higher chance that users could complain, you never know why someone might have abandoned their account ... there's probably the risk of imposing too ...maybe more
Issues of scale, probably. With admins, they probably hire a few new admins a year, and not all of those will want to take over an old username. But if they open it up to everybody, that's potentially thousands of requests they have to deal with. They'd need some way to receive the requests (and you can use existing communication channels, because those are needed for more serious issues), they'd probably need some way to automate it, it might be exploitable, etc. Just overall a pain in the butt.
So if you wanted, you could literally just change your account user name to u/br094 and I’d be screwed? (Ignoring the abandoned part of the policy, of course)
I mean, the original would email support and be like “hey what about my account?” so they’d either be like “git gud” (make a new account) or they’d have to make the admin give it up
If someone was so inclined to email support about their decade old account, support would 100% tell them to make a new account. No karma, no posts/comments, abandoned, oh well. They weren’t using it.
His account had 0 post history and 0 karma, and was almost definitely made before there was an email requirement. It also hadn't even been logged into in probably a long time. There was nothing of substance to his account.
If "his account" was to change nicknames, what would that even mean to you? There would be nothing to move to the new account.
Can you guys change your username? I know it's technically a disaster because posts and comments that mention your username link to it, but can you change it despite that?
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u/bro Apr 23 '19
We have a policy where admins can inherit completely abandoned, inactive and empty usernames (no karma, activity, etc). I was lucky this username met all the requirements. When I inherited the username, the cake day was reset.