Bitcoin Forum

Recently we have been noticing quite a handful of username changes and some does seem to create confusion among other forum users like this situation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4746201.msg52912373#msg52912373) or this situation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5212948.0). If there is a name change of notable user or someone who have been here for long time, it would be better if they have made a post or report on the same for their name change. Some forum accounts are identified only through their reputation and it is quite important in a forum where money is involved.

For instance, we never knew the real name of satoshi but the alias was very important in the creation of bitcoin. Similarly, there are quite a handful of us where this forum name would be literally well known and would be considered as an important identity. If someone is willing to report their name change in forum could use this topic or create a newer one.

This is how you check a user's original username: click MY MESSAGES (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm) > New Message (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm;sa=send) > Find Members > Enter current username > Search > Click the username under Results.
Then, check the field after "To:" on the new message you're sending.

mjglqw or should I say mk4 is one of the most notable user in our local section. I was surprised on how mjglqw changed his username, it also comes to a point that I think mk4 is an alternative account because they are both wearing their website avatar and a chipmixer signature.

Are these changing username is based on how much of their contributions inside the community in order to be given a chance by theymos? Or is it because they paid bitcoin? ???

It is no surprise if there is an increase of change of username request in the community.

You can add this, I am not sure if this is accurate but yeah, I am sure on Micgoossens because of his signature haha,
Theymos is having a good mood for approving a lot of username change request  :D



I think it's happening because Theymos is on good mood or based on the recently change username they are all valuable members, so random members requesting for changing their username will be ignored I think.

Or as long as you have a acceptable reason to change you username I think.

theymos changes usernames only when he is convinced with their PM and would consider doing so only he does know your username to some extent. alia changed their name from alia_armalle (not sure about the name) by sending a message to theymos and he has said it would be done after going through the trust scores as well. So probably its kind of either your request of changing username may get accepted or rejected.

Mods are the ones who can change their usernames now and then without paying btc (Donators and VIPs)

AFAIK SMF allows changing of display names, but theymos changed the rule for usernames when there were scams going on with these changed usernames.

See this :


This was way back in 2011, then it was changed to the fact that forum users with good reputation can change their usernames if they feel like.

Added. Thanks

I did notice a couple of users who have changed their usernames. Thank you for making a summary.

I remembered the time when I was still a newbie, and there are still a couple of signature campaigns back then that accept that rank. I luckily got taken in that campaign when someone impersonated my account, the link of the impersonator here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=921758) and posted a change of BTC address IIRC. When that happened, I reported it to the mod, and I think it got banned.

So the point of my story above is that, after reporting it and whatnot, my username changed. From a capital "C" to a small letter "c". "Crwth" to "crwth" I know I registered it as a capital C, but I just remembered it now that that is the moment.

Do you guys think I will be given a chance to make it into a capital letter again? I know that it's a small thing, but it somewhat matters. Lol.

Interesting research.
I understand that in some rear cases member would need to change his username,
but I hope this will not become a habit and a trend in 2020

Agreed, it's quite confusing when some well known members change their names. :D

All written posts referring to e.g. "micgoossens" will be confused by members when they read them and they don't know "who's that legendary micgoossens, his name is written all over the forum but I can't find an account".  :D
In addition, it's a little change for the history of the account. While I've associated micgoossens witch a Dutch Bitcoiner (and a duck), El duderino_ seems to be someone from espanyol. xD

I hope, the old names are not available to register new accounts.  :-X

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I would give it a try.  :)
Your chances aren't bad and asking doesn't cost BTC. ;)

Killyou72 just sounds much better off the tongue, amirite??

I’m not to bothered, but some maybe chose a name change with reasons, not to find every 5 threads and posts a direct link to there name change .... ::) ::)

@1miau

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5oLE0GUtOWs

El duderino history.....

I just think when there is a valid reason, then theymos is a most reasonable man.

Did I give you the idea for this? Maybe. I remember you asking something like this, I said, it's a simple message, won't hurt to try.

I also hope the same.
BPIP website is not showing old names, and I would like confirmation from someone that old members user names can not be used in new registrations...

I gave it a try and it seems that their old username is in available for using it again.

micgoossens - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2744287

@asu

I’ve never interacted with you on here before & I can see that you’re a Legendary Member with positive trust but part of me can’t help but feel this is a bit of a dick move. I’ve met ... multiple times in real life & consider him a real friend so I felt compelled to leave a comment here.

I hope that you’ve only done this to test the forum, kind of like a Meta task because ... is DT1 & a lives very comfortably in real life. There could quite easily be opportunities to abuse the account ‘micgoossens’ for personal gain.

You should have kept this discrete & not made it public imo if you were just testing if it’d be possible to create a new account in a recently changed nickname.

I’m going to keep me eye on this but the first thing I’m doing it tagging the ..... account so people know it’s not the real OG ....

Apologies if I’ve offended you, it wasn’t my intention.

LFC

I don't see any ill intent here. It's good to know that old usernames can be recycled. That's a huge risk IMO and a very good reason to reconsider changing one's username, or at least to re-register the old one preemptively.

You're one of the better forum user, better people around.....

But some of who I know preferred not be known anymore by previous forum name, then why keep making those posts, you should respect there wishes with this.... let say some have some issues with scams or whatever, then why keep connecting unnecessarily dots?

These are no circumstances like Alt accounts or whatsoever who's doing harm to anybody... like take me as an example, you know my previous and new name, if something would be wrong then you can easily find out, nobody is harmed by my name change....

Those things are not for nothing, I think with invalid reason we cannot change our name.

Interesting: this breaks the link between old and new username as I described here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5215892.msg53553429#msg53553429).

Am I the only one who thought it's a good thing to know changing your username means you can lose your old name? That's especially imporant for Donators who temporarily change their name to something else!

Please stop offending me by apologizing for offending people (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5213722.msg53482650#msg53482650) ;)

What harm does publishing that info do to anyone? Your old username is all over the place in every old quote etc. If you want a clean start create a new account.

I'm not only speaking for myself, I have noticed name changes and people didn't post for months anymore.... then take back where they left.

As for me for example if i'm have been in any kind of weird situation, but I know there could be a problem... changed name cause of good reason... writes months with the new name then you're getting out of the picture ...

If every where keeps been written he was him etc then its just more easy...

I left a red trust too on the new test account by asu (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5215892.msg53561725#msg53561725).

I never too, in fact I am not a meta much guy. But I think this was just a test attempt so no harm will be taken from it.

I am with micG here. I am not thinking about any harm and stuffs but a part of me is saying that it's better to respect ones wish than arguing about it. This whole thread seems wrong to me for those who wanted it to keep the changes unnoticed.

I personally have no issue since my reason was about exposing the project I am working for my little girl but yes this is the exact reason (Mic's quote) for those who would not like this topic.

The whole idea for ... was to change his username because after some time he thought the username could identify his real identity. He PM’d theymos & was luckily granted permission to change it.

Now he’s got full attention back on him again. I can’t speak for ... but I’d be annoyed if it was me.

Edit - BitcoinGirl.Club - It took me a while to figure out who you were. I was looking through my PM’s from ages ago & I spotted the name :D

I think announcing the registration here is a good move overall and we could always track the activity if needed and act accordingly. Or he could just give the accounts details to micgoossens, oo sorry' El duderino_ and he can change it later. But even after all this I don't think @asu would use this accounts for any trivial benifits.

Start a new account then. I don't get the point of keeping the same account and not wanting anyone to notice the change, especially considering the squatting risk.

Agreed. I don't think you can get a name change if theymos doesn't recognize your username, and if theymos recognizes it, many others will recognize it too. So there's no scenario in which you can change your name unnoticed.

For me the discussion stops here.
Do as you al knowing guys seems fit.

If every move is to be questioned and no respect can be shown by just easily say... "hey NP if you feel this is best for you, then we respect that wish"

There seems to hardly be any way to have your cake and to eat it too - I mean retaining some of the benefits of the credibility carried over from the old name to the new name, so of course, there can be some benefits in changing your user name, but seemingly the ONLY way to completely lose the connection of the possible negatives that have come to your old user name would be to create a new account and to really start over.. and maybe not even mention the old user name in connection with the new account.

There is also security through obscurity, too.. and there are likely other means of attempting to NOT draw the wrong kinds of attention to yourself.. and the interwebs are filled with fucktwats.. Well, maybe you ONLY need 1 in a million fucktwats, and that is enough to cause potential real life issues in the meat space.

Any of us who are outspoken forum members retain some of these potential security issues, and yeah, there are folks who have purposefully chosen to be notorious public figures in the bitcoin world or the crypto space, and even many of them (if you really attempt to delve into their personal matters) can tell stories of various kinds of issues or attack attempts upon them.. of course, Jameson Lopp is a known example, but there are plenty of others, too.

Just consider some of the issues that we might have admitted to ONLY owning 1 BTC and given some details regarding that 1 BTC, but fuck all about the god damned BTC price going up to a million and now our paltry amount of BTC has real value in terms of the many normies who had not known about BTC in the early adoptions days that we still seem to be in... just like 2017... holy fuck, even I witnessed the crazies coming out of the woodwork in my real life in regards to the BTC topic, and I had wallets with fractions of a BTC that I had considered as just dust that turned into real and meaningful value.. .. that .05 BTC that I had purchased for $12 in late 2015, all of a sudden was worth $1,000 in late 2017.. and I had not even realized that I was carrying around that amount of value.. because it happened so fast, relatively speaking when we have other things going on in our lives, too.

It was fun for me to have a little bit hide and seek, to create a little confusion. Even in the EPL pool I got one post deleted coz mod thought I was someone else (don't blame him of course) and bunches of others incidences was pretty enjoying. For instance, someone is the EPL pool is thinking they finally found a girl who is interested in the pool in sports (Football/soccer whatever the F**k you call it)😜
May be I need to inform Steve too so that he do not flag my sportsbet.io account for unauthorized access LOL

Point is, someone with a little known to us who had communication with us know our style, interest; so whatever our identity (username), it is meant to get noticed that this is us the same people. There are no need to document anything or to find a special place to farewell us.

I go here with Mic again. Haven't we earn at least some credibility to get some respect from the community by not asking too many questions and feel okay just the way we are?

I think I have already gave the answer with my point above.

Pretty simple to make sense. 😀

This would be something theymos could create: a new rank that shows you're an old user, without disclosing your old account.
If Admin only creates such accounts for users who made a name for themselves, it could be a solution to have and eat the cake!
I too wouldn't mind having more privacy, but once it's gone, there's no way to get it back.

For long time reputation board was a bit quite and now it seems to have some life again with this new directions  of name changing. Lately I have noticed a lot of the users to do that and as long as the admin is okay with it then I see no problem here. I really do not see any need for discussions too. If those users want privacy then let them have it. Some of them earned the respect from the community for sure.

Actually we can. Just stop talking about it and let the topic to be buried under tons of topics we have in the board. Not everyone is LoyceV or other guys who are good at analysing data. Not talking about it anymore at-least will give a semi privacy for those users. Let them enjoy it at-least.

Everyone has their reasons and we should be okay with it instead of pointing out our fingers on them.

The primary idea behind the creation of this topic is to have a transparency in the change of user names and to prevent further confusion among the new users or someone who is not really having a grasp on these changes recently. The idea behind the topic wasn't to break the privacy of the above mentioned users in the name of revealing their new usernames and I further believe that these forum name changes shouldn't go unnoticed in a forum which deals with reputation and money. We have been noticing various scams which are being used by scammers to trick newbies in the name of reputed users over here and in telegram as well.

I have been part of various torrenting forums for quite a long time (8+ years) where username changes are quite common and we could change the names whenever we like and none does care about that. But as far as this forum is concerned, each username carries a reputation and if the reputation is being mishandled by scammers, we would be seeing unnecessary loss of funds which would turn the plates towards the older user names. To prevent these bizarre circumstances, I have created this topic. This was one among the important reasons why theymos removed the username change feature from this forum.

There is always one satoshi, one sirius, one cobra, one theymos, one micgoossens, one Pamoldar in this bitcoin ecosystem! Fraudsters like CSW shouldn't claim himself to be satoshi nor does any forum scammer shouldn't claim themselves as micgoossens or Pamoldar and these recent name changes should never pave way for those situations.

I am not sure if your proposal is really fair for other members, so a lot of this remains a kind of balance in which many of us might come to differing conclusions.  Of course, if we are in a BAD situation, we might want to have as many benefits as we can get, but if we are NOT in the situation, we might blame the other user(s) for possibly contributing to his/her own problem by employing weak OpSec.  So, yeah, there are degrees, and sometimes even the ability of members to go back and wipe all of their previous posts can be a cost upon the membership to have to suffer with members who seem to NOT take responsibility for their earlier posts.. but then again, 4 or more years later, there might be some motivations for members to delete some prior disclosures.. and sometimes even to edit earlier posts to change what had actually been said and the context.

Surely, I am NOT proclaiming to know any of the answers exactly, even for myself, because even I understand that I am likely NOT the same person who I was nearly 6 years ago when I began posting in this forum.  Also, sometimes I might disagree with some kind of content of the post of another person, or even some kind of mixing of real world and forum situations, or become sympathetic to something that seems to have had happened to another member in the real world that might be attributable to forum information/conduct, but then the circumstances are NOT always well known or even knowable either.  I have thought one way about the circumstances of another forum member, and then a third forum member comes into the scene to assert another scenario that I had not considered in my prior assessment.

When I first joined the forum, I, actually, was quite bothered by forum practices that allowed editing or deleting of prior posts, but now, I understand that there can be some value to members who might get themselves into a bit of a pickle (and might not even have had been of their own creation) and might need to edit or delete some or all of their earlier posts without asking for permission from forum administrators.. even while the forum itself may end up suffering somewhat from the removal of some of those earlier contributions and context for other posts that might have been built around their earlier posts.

I said last post a little bit up here, but serious bro.... I know probably best intentions etc

But all those above points are similar like minerjones (real deal) a scammer names himself minerjones. (or whatever)
The copy will be revealed by the forum ASAP more fast as a newbie finding out in this thread or where ever who is who.....

Like micgoossens is taken—-> instant red trust problem solved, each name that’s been changed then the previous could be banned or made and given red trust to prevent all the above ....

From this OP I know it’s best intentions as I seen him before creating and contributing (I do respect you)
-though I would think our points to have some meaning etc and some people a bit disappointed me but whatever the world is still round and going..... so that’s that

But I could easily think a dozen of names if they made this thread I would say just some merit hunting going on...

Did someone thought about the effect of this username changes on the other users trust lists who have included or excluded them ? Like trust list is organised by using the usernames of the accounts and not UID so even after username change the UID remains same and only the username would be changed. Most of the user's trust list would be up with one of the old username and all gets messed up.

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Anyways, the account registered by @asu under micgoossens username is autobanned by some logical mod around. I don't think you need to worry about it again El duderino_. Enjoy your privacy !

That's not cool. I hope mods make an exception for asu otherwise he'll get banned for evasion if some asshole reports him.

The trust list in our trust setting page, takes the usernames but stores in the database using the userID (u). So changing username is not effecting anyone trust list. I had El duderino_ in my trust list when he had his previous username and I see it has been changed to El duderino_ without needing any touch from me.

May be for scrappers like LoyceV, DdmrDdmr and others will find some difficulties with this username changes but with the system, I think we are really fine.

Technically yes but practically it will be very wrong. Rules are made (al-thought we do not have any official rules) to protect the community not to use against it.

If we act practical then I do not see any problem at all.

Correct. When updating my Trust list viewer, "missing" names give an error which requires manual intervention. After that, my Trust list viewer (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5102296.0) shows the new name from that week onwards. Older versions still show the old name though.

I thought most bitcoiners were all about anonymity, security, and privacy? Seems to me that outing these users when they changed their usernames, would be an invasion of privacy. I'm sure each and every one of them had a reason to change their name correct?

Now with this thread, the name change was mostly worthless for most of the users who requested it. I see some arguing that the only way to get away from it completely would be to start all over. Well, that is of course an option, but then they lose their rank. That may or may not be important to everyone, but I know some of these guys earn money in signature campaigns so starting over may not have been an option unless they didn't mind losing the income.

Why grant the name change for these users if this was going to be the result?

I'm almost certain that most name changes aren't done to hide who they are. I mean, if you fucked up in the past and change your name to hide that, there will always be quotes off your old name. Plus trust feedback and flags don't change, so what's the point in doing that? The only way to truly start over is to create a new account.

A name change will, of course, still increase your privacy a little bit, but all I'm trying to say is that there will always be posts that contain your old name. Maybe even positive trust ratings where they mention your old name.

That would be something, but if your new rank, for example, shows as "New Legendary" instead of just "Legendary" then that new account get's "noticed" as well, and some internet detective is going to connect the dots. Anything but the original rank is going to arouse suspicion.

As well, a brand new account with a rank higher than Newbie, would look interesting if it had 0 merits and 1 post or something like that, ... assuming it gets created with the minimum required for that rank, then it would start out with 1000 merits for Legendary, but none earned (and of course no sMerits to give out), I don't think the post count would display properly.

Anyone wanting to actually use the new account would have to "prepare" it by posting real posts for a few days to make it look "normal", then granted the rank or something.

Obviously, any feedback or reputation from the old account would not transfer to the new one.

If it's too much work, admins won't do it and just avoid the issue altogether. And finally, creation date, will it be "today" or back dated?

This didn't work for me. "To:" just has the new username... did something change?

I bet this guy (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=291044) is like "heeeyyy wtf!"  ;D

My guess is that this only works when only the display name was changed.

If you do the above with Murat (old iwantapony) it works (only display name changed - for appearance reasons). But if you do with mk4 (old mjglkw) it doens’t work (both display and login name changed - for privacy reasons).

Some context about the privacy/appearance name change reasons: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5216451.msg53569598#msg53569598

He will be forever known as Killyou72 (or Killyou73) ;D.

I am little bit surprised after seeing that some of our community user have changed their old username and put new one. I don't think that its was an wise decision for them and hopefully many others will be agree with me. In bitcointalk there is millions of users but personally i don't know all one by one and its not possible for anyone too but some names have been saved on my memory because of two reason.

No 1: I know some best contributors for their unforgettable contribution and hard work for the forum. In this criteria i prefer to accept scam busters, quality posters, donators, default trusted members, campaign managers and some more extraordinary people. Wherever i see their name it remind me their working background and obviously their contribution too. So definitely i can say that my thinking creates with their username not with the real person behind that account.

No 2: After seeing some username i can easily recognize proven scammers, spammers, loan defaulters, account sellers and many more people who are connected with fraudulent activities. Its because there is open scam accusation against them and my memory saved their username as bad guys. So in this part same as past i don't know their real identity but their username is pushing my mind to invent their working background.

In conclusion i wanna say that it doesn't matter if you have a weird username or bad looking one but it really matters how community users are connected with your old username. Yeah maybe you can get new one but definitely that will not give you the respect or acceptance like old one. Your username is the symbol of your past doings.      

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1302818
^
or that guy  ::)

Probably we all just love Lebowski or the dude or duder or his dudeness or just "El duderino"

I also spoke to one user who changed his username recently "Murat" and when he said he worked with me earlier, I was surprised that he could change as earlier this option was available on to few users.

But for trusted and reputed users, it can turn confusing especially if they are escrows and traders as to find out their old username would be very tough. It's better if Theymos later adds a feature where you can find the old username (or have it displayed below the new username).

If users want their old username known they can put it into their personal text under the avatar and carry it there for a few months. That's what I would do if I ever decide to change my username (yes, I realize some asshole will try to impersonate me now).

Bah, who cares what that guy thinks?  :P   The other guy is a full member who seemed more recently active but I guess he's not that active *shrug* a username is a username, just wouldn't want anyone attempting an impersonation on you later on and people getting confused. One can hope people aren't that stupid but.. well.. people have fallen for these things before. The guy seems legitimate enough not to do that though. ;)

I do like the name though, who doesn't like the big lebowski??  It's a classic!  :)

I'm thinking it's time for me to change my name to IBJesus. Nobody fucks with the Jesus (https://youtu.be/Y9w9EiLTZ_A). And I feel like I've been fucked with a bit recently, so it might work out for me lol.

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edit:
Hah!  Or, reverse all display names.  renimbi   VecyoL    noomhcus   _onireduD lE     ratSklaT    <-- these would drive me crazy for the day  ;D

For April 1st, we should get theymos to exchange our usernames :D I'm curious if anyone would even notice.

This gives an unfair advantage to the junior member of the cycling club (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1188543).

This make sense, if that user wishes to do so....

The other old usernames should be retired also. They shouldn't be used again.

Other old usernames can't be use to register again and while others can be (case to case basis). It all just comes down to their reason why.

I missed that thread but I was actually thinking about retiring usernames of those who changed for privacy reasons.

Seriously. Some of these name changers might have done some bad opsec in the past hence why they need to change their username, but why shine the spotlight on them? It completely defeats the purpose. While it's still going to be really possible to affiliate them to their old usernames through their past posts, still. Shining the spotlight on them just makes it a lot easier for doxxing.

As long as they didn't do anything wrong in the past, I don't have anything against their decisions. I mean, privacy is one of the things us bitcoiners are fighting for right? Then what the fuck is this? Bullshit is what this is.

^^
I feel this thread was made mainly because that most of the users are trustworthy and one whom I know is a bounty manager and hence, it is confusing when these users with new usernames contact anyone and say I was earlier that user and them conducting a research to know if they are telling the truth. I don't get the privacy thing as they can still be identified having only changed their display names. One user seemed to have changed their username to make it look better and professional not for privacy reasons while others no clue.

I guess OP's title should be changed to "display name" instead of "username" as usernames have not changed.

Why are you guys posting the old names of people who clearly needed their names changed for privacy reasons? Obviously any data posted online is going to be quickly archived somewhere, but that doesn't mean that your highlighting/reposting of it has no effect. In some cases you may literally be putting lives in danger. If you were investigating a scam or something, that'd be different, but you seem to just be indiscriminately & recklessly dredging up data that would best be forgotten.


Privacy is the top reason for me agreeing to a name change. It's just not often done for well-known users, and I don't announce it.


When a name is changed for privacy reasons, I sometimes partially or completely fix that. I consider quotes of the form [quote author=... link=topic=... to be fixable; other quotes are not.


 - If it looks like there's much chance that a scam case will be opened against someone, then I won't change their name to begin with.
 - Flags/feedback most often don't exist for users whose names I change
 - The Trust system is intentionally not accessible to search engines.
 - Trust ratings don't usually mention a user's original name or other sensitive details.

This is precisely what happens when you allow users to what amounts to spy on forum members. There is a job posting on Facebook (working for the company) for someone whose job it is to detect and stop scraping. I have been told this person would be on a fairly large team/group of people who have similar responsibilities. Other social media platforms have similar roles and all have policies prohibiting scraping (often being defined as non-human, or inauthentic or similar).

There should be a balance between allowing everyone to do whatever they want and having minor regulations, while empathizing the need for regulations to be minimally burdensome/costly, while providing a real benefit to the community as a whole that it cannot otherwise realize.

Who knows how much additional data certain people has on forum users, probably a decent amount, and probably enough to make a lot of people uncomfortable if they knew exactly what was being collected on them by third parties, even if the information is “public”.  

I am sure if it continues this way one day it would be out of theymos hand's to control the amount of misuse of this data, as it is already been violating the main reason behind the implementations of some systems like trust list for example, mostly it begin as being something very private for users to make there own judgement but making it public just induced more drama. Even merit sources which were to be hidden for not being bitched for merits are now easily accessible to anyone who wants to hunt some.

If the this type of excessive scraping would not be curbed or handled now, than it would already be too late.

I was almost giving up on this thread. I have email notification on but I was thinking to disable it so that I do not need to receive the email notification of the same posts posted by users with argumens. Some are in favour of documenting the changes and some are against it. The conversation can keep going and the thread gets bumped and search engine keeps caching it.

Those users who changed their names for privacy reasons, are now not really feeling the same I guess. In this forum users are making thousands of topics a day, how many of them we all notice dispite all of them are public but if we pick one of these topics and highlight it in somewhere like it's done for usernames in this topic, then it's easily discoverable. This topic actually doing the job of destroying the intentions some of those users had as their reasons behind changing their names.

I am glad that theymos has spoken out. And since theymos involved in this conversation, I would like him to consider deleting the entire thread so that in futures any with bad deed at least do not find everything in one place (in this thread). There are differences in between looking all over the place to find something (which in some cases turns out impossible) and finding something in one place (documented) very easily.

Everyone has their own views of this proposal of deleting this enture thread, even people can say that deleting this topic will mean that theymos in implying his power of position to control the voice of the users but really shell we say thst? Privacy should be the first thing we should count here. And every users has this right to practice their privacy. if a forum inspired with bitcoin idiology can not ensure it then it's sad.

I to had given up on this thread as it was just a disappointment to me, as the opinion and talking of some members was even a bigger disappointment ....

But i'm glad reading some of the last posts of this thread.

(Bottomline I do think theymos isn't keeping himself busy with changing peoples names or taking it very lightly when he does)

For merit sources there isn't anything more easy then ignore merit beggars and if some do, then they just get some negative trust as being merit beggars ....
So most people will not be merit begging cause they no nothing good will come from it.

I have removed the list I had posted earlier in the thread. I appreciate the privacy concerns and I apologize for underestimating them when I posted that.

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Big words from someone who's stalking forum members on social media.

Let's face it Quicksy, your only concern is your account farm (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5216961.0).

Thanks for doing the right thing.

Mmmm crazy what a theymos post can bring to the place, suddenly people realise things

then again better late than never   ::) :P

I doubt that the matter is so clear as some supposed enlightened philosopher king shedding light on this particular matter.

The change of user names matter cuts both ways in terms of transparency and in terms of attempts to balance interests of individuals and the community as a whole.

I personally don't get any kind of hard-on to give tools to folks who are abusive of these kinds of information systems, yet I stick by my earlier assertions regarding the possible necessity to start a new account as being a feasible and practical avenue...   

Sure, it is nice that theymos and/or other admins are NOT necessarily lightly allowing for the changes of usernames... and surely I hope that those admins are NOT getting duped also by allowing for some change(s) when it might not be justified.. but sure, those are administrative balancing considerations that are discretionary and not necessarily clear cut.. and not even needing to be public... and any member who errors on arguing this subject on the side of transparency and disallowance of such username changes would not necessarily be in the wrong... even if they also might not have enough information in any particular case to know what were the various factors considered for any particular case.

Let's have a thought experiment:we already have Bitcoin mixers. What if we would have a Bitcointalk Account Mixer?
For the sake or argument let's assume there are 8 people with more or less similar accounts (similar Rank, similar Trust, similar language). Those 8 account owners would all exchange their account in a big random shuffle, where none of them knows who gets which account. Their feedback can get a bold marker stating the date of the account shuffle, so it's obvious the older feedback belonged to a different person.
Of course, this isn't ideal: the post history for instance suddenly doesn't belong to the person anymore. But the most important argument against account sales won't be a problem: none of these people would have an increased reason to start scamming or spamming with the "new" account.

I don’t doubt the information is already being misused.

The thing is that the people who are spying on forum members don’t reasonably own the data they are collecting. Ditto for those who are scraping posts and other information. So I don’t think it would be fair for these people to make the decision to disclose or not.

Most of the time when a third party adds some additional functionality to a social media platform, they connect via API and only request the specific information needed to display the additional information to their user. It is unusual for a third party to have their own database of information they display.

When someone posts on the forum, they are making the informed implicit decision to trust theymos with various information. With so many people spying on forum members and scraping various information from the forum, their information is being given to people they don’t necessarily trust and probably aren’t aware their information is being collected by these people. 

Just an opinion, people with some sort of privacy issue with their current forum accounts and need to actually disappear, would request a complete deletion of entire history, and possibly just reserve the account name (by recreating it) and simply never log in after that.

If I would request a name change, (and I think I had the opportunity to do that for a few years, but never exercised the option) I'd want something even shorter. But that's just me.

Hm. This is probably a good time to follow suit? @Heisenberg_Hunter?

Have been a little busy over 3 days to check whats happening here in this topic, but I have been reading that, the primary intention of this topic has delved into something very different to privacy and risking of user accounts in the process. I would like to apologize if the topic has created harm to the privacy things of the above mentioned accounts but the intentions of starting this topic was never meant to mean that or to reveal their privacy centric changes.

I have not really encountered major changes like these in the past and all I have seen is a complete name change which was done years before. Other changes were done by the donators and mods but all were minor changes to those display names as far as I know. With theymos clearing up these and concerning the privacy of others, I had deleted the names mentioned in OP and hence locking the topic.