Suggestion: add an official implementation for past Usernames

Question

Hi!

I just had an idea. What if on our profiles, we had a separate field for modifying a list of usernames we've had in the past. You could of course add this without keeping track of username changes programatically, a user could set this field themselves. Just to make it easier for others to recognize a user who they knew before but has since changed their username. This wouldn't just add the functionality, but would serve as an encouragement to more widely have this data available.

Edit: To be honest, the optimal solution really would be to store each username used by a user in a database column (or similar), and automatically retrieve this data and display it upon visiting a user's Profile page. The user could optionally modify this list themselves and "add new entries" to fix the issue of old, "untracked" usernames not being stored before this feature now would be added, if it were to. I didn't really suggest this thing here because, I assumed maybe it would be more of an annoyance to implement, and thus receive a much smaller chance of actually being added. Work and all, am I right?

What do you guys think? Is this a good idea or what?

Comments

It could be convenient, but if people really want to display their past names, can't they just use the About Me?

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Of course. I just thought this would "standardize" the behavior and really make it more universal on the site, rather than based on purely one's own initiative of making this available. It would be a field to make it more natural, and easier, too, instead of using the About Me section (mostly used now if one has this).
I'm open to other opinions, of course, but I thought I'd post the idea. :)

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Ahh, that does make sense. I'm not entirely sure another section on profiles is truly needed, but I do see your reasoning.

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I do see where you're coming from. The motivation for this proposal is that, I deem it fairly important in a sense to be able to recognize old friends and such on this site, which would be harder done should they not have added this on their About Me section. This would, hopefully, serve as a magnet to help all do this. :-)

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Apparently, a future update of Q2A will give users public-facing ID numbers that can be used to give continuity between different usernames. This would serve a similar purpose to keeping every past username in a table (though that might still be helpful in a community like this one).

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Ah, I see. I agree with your last part, though, names would be much easier to remember for this purpose than an assigned ID number.

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That sounds fun, though. It's like our own National Dex ID xD