User profiles don't have a name history anymore.
Is there still some way of accessing it?

Could trace it back the hard way via records.

You can never figure out who I am!

Mairo said:
You can never figure out who I am!

While we're here, why did the ri become ir?

wous said:
While we're here, why did the ri become ir?

Was there ever an "ri" in Mairo's name...?

Siral_Exan said:
Was there ever an "ri" in Mairo's name...?

Without a doubt and until only just very recently.

Siral_Exan said:
Was there ever an "ri" in Mairo's name...?

it wouldnt be first time i have been misreading someone's name awkwardly long

Mairo said:
You can never figure out who I am!

post #1008487 post #373697

Why was this removed and when?? I never noticed til now!!

BlackLicorice said:
Why was this removed and when?? I never noticed til now!!

Got patched in late last week, and we added it because people have used our username history to dox and harass our users. There's also the problem of people signing up with their non-furry nicknames, then later realizing it might hurt their job prospects.
So we've been taking steps to alleviate those issues.

NotMeNotYou said:
Got patched in late last week, and we added it because people have used our username history to dox and harass our users. There's also the problem of people signing up with their non-furry nicknames, then later realizing it might hurt their job prospects.
So we've been taking steps to alleviate those issues.

wut

Queen_Tyr'ahnee said:
post #1008487 post #373697

...Li'lSexSpark?

Mairo said:
You can never figure out who I am!

https://e621.net/ticket/show/37679

NotMeNotYou said:
Got patched in late last week, and we added it because people have used our username history to dox and harass our users. There's also the problem of people signing up with their non-furry nicknames, then later realizing it might hurt their job prospects.
So we've been taking steps to alleviate those issues.

That's fair. I was initially kinda hesitant about this because of the potential for amuse--letting someone harass someone, then change names and harass them from a "new person" or something (basically, nothing that couldn't be circumvented with an alt account, but still) ... ... I think my 'ideal' would be to display the most recent username for a period of time--and if someone has work concerns, a double change could be done or something... buuuuut people will just lie, so whatever.

Thanks for doing the right thing to try and make things better for yoru users. :)

SnowWolf said:
That's fair. I was initially kinda hesitant about this because of the potential for amuse--letting someone harass someone, then change names and harass them from a "new person" or something (basically, nothing that couldn't be circumvented with an alt account, but still) ... ... I think my 'ideal' would be to display the most recent username for a period of time--and if someone has work concerns, a double change could be done or something... buuuuut people will just lie, so whatever.

Thanks for doing the right thing to try and make things better for yoru users. :)

We admins can still see the full history and all types of records and tickets use the User-ID instead. The actual amount of abuse is going to be heavily limited since reporting someone will still show up as the same person to us.

NotMeNotYou said:
We admins can still see the full history and all types of records and tickets use the User-ID instead. The actual amount of abuse is going to be heavily limited since reporting someone will still show up as the same person to us.

Oh I don't doubt that-- I jsut know that I would be one of those peopel who thinks about, but doesn't report someone who's annoying me... y'know. I'm a big girl, I can deal with someone being a bit of a jerk. Worst case scenario I.. Oh.. well that is an interesting question.

e621:blacklist says that you can blacklist specific users (... actually, I think I wrote the original text for that, once upon a time.... Neat!) by blacklisting, say, user:snowwolf ...and you can "Apply Blacklisted Users to Forum Posts, Comments, Dmails, and Blip"...

... this obviously isn't a problem specific to not seeing history of name changes, but... ... can a user just change their name to get around someone's efforts to block them...? Or I mean, that doesn't even have to be malicious in nature...

I mean, I guess it's been that way for ages and hasn't really been a problem... just got me thinking that now there'd be no way for someone to see that bloodandgoreforever changed their name to gutsandbeauty and that's why their blacklist seems to be broken. which really isn't that big of a deal. Just... thinking.

SnowWolf said:
Oh I don't doubt that-- I jsut know that I would be one of those peopel who thinks about, but doesn't report someone who's annoying me... y'know. I'm a big girl, I can deal with someone being a bit of a jerk. Worst case scenario I.. Oh.. well that is an interesting question.

e621:blacklist says that you can blacklist specific users (... actually, I think I wrote the original text for that, once upon a time.... Neat!) by blacklisting, say, user:snowwolf ...and you can "Apply Blacklisted Users to Forum Posts, Comments, Dmails, and Blip"...

... this obviously isn't a problem specific to not seeing history of name changes, but... ... can a user just change their name to get around someone's efforts to block them...? Or I mean, that doesn't even have to be malicious in nature...

I mean, I guess it's been that way for ages and hasn't really been a problem... just got me thinking that now there'd be no way for someone to see that bloodandgoreforever changed their name to gutsandbeauty and that's why their blacklist seems to be broken. which really isn't that big of a deal. Just... thinking.

Can we blacklist users by id instead, maybe?

NotMeNotYou said:
Got patched in late last week, and we added it because people have used our username history to dox and harass our users. There's also the problem of people signing up with their non-furry nicknames, then later realizing it might hurt their job prospects.
So we've been taking steps to alleviate those issues.

im so glad about this honestly. having my username history visible has been thorn in my side for a while now because of this one particularly persistent stalker...

Furrin_Gok said:
Can we blacklist users by id instead, maybe?

Not yet but hopefully soon.

Lord_Eggplant said:
im so glad about this honestly. having my username history visible has been thorn in my side for a while now because of this one particularly persistent stalker...

I really wish we could upvote/thumbs up/like/whatever forum posts too-- this is exactly the sort of thing I'd love to be able to appreciate without having to post about it.

NotMeNotYou said:
Not yet but hopefully soon.

So's this for that matter :) but this pleases me. tha'ts way more comprehensive :D

People will just stalk by user ID from now on

Queen_Tyr'ahnee said:
post #1008487 post #373697

I like how pictorial replies make you think.
I thought initially you were saying "Mario.. suck my dick."
Then I realized you nailed the full username exactly.

Lord_Eggplant said:
im so glad about this honestly. having my username history visible has been thorn in my side for a while now because of this one particularly persistent stalker...

.. Yeah, I'm with Munkelzahn. UID is typically supposed to be a persistent id, so that's definitely what people will do. Seems like you could either avoid a "paper trail" (by creating a new account), or keep your posts, comments + etc, but not both.

savageorange said:
I like how pictorial replies make you think.
I thought initially you were saying "Mario.. suck my dick."
Then I realized you nailed the full username exactly.

post #1204157post #39168

This is a change I’m happy to see. It always bothered me that you could see all the names a user previously went by.

savageorange said:
.. Yeah, I'm with Munkelzahn. UID is typically supposed to be a persistent id, so that's definitely what people will do. Seems like you could either avoid a "paper trail" (by creating a new account), or keep your posts, comments + etc, but not both.

That requires that people actually have the UID before the name change occurred. Which is highly unlikely in a lot of cases, and especially when the stalking comes from google.
It's certainly not perfect but it's a lot better than before.

I take your google point, but what I was thinking of was that name changes are tracked, and in the ticket, original username is shown, and a link containing UID is given. That means, AFAICS, that UID is ideal but one of the user's past names would also do.

(still, tickets are not searchable, so that would entail spidering through ~18000 tickets , given that original username is NOT shown in the index. Definitely an improvement.)

NotMeNotYou said:
That requires that people actually have the UID before the name change occurred. Which is highly unlikely in a lot of cases, and especially when the stalking comes from google.
It's certainly not perfect but it's a lot better than before.

Actually, it's not that simple.
Suppose I wanted to stalk someone named "Mario69".
I wouldn't even have to use the evil Google, DDG is enough:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mario69&t=ffab&ia=web

#1413967: hecchi_dechu - e621
Mario69 said: Welp, seems like french are pretty open about sexual humor. Oh yes. Yes we do.
https://e621.net/post/show/1413967/accidental_penetration-animated-anthro-anus-bear-b

The post has a quote by Mario69 where the name is a link to the proifle and OMG he has been unmasked.

Solution:
Make a new Dtext tag for users
In Edit mode, it shows up like this:
user #38571
In non-Edit mode, it shows up like:
Mairo (so if he changed his name to "Moria", all quotes of his would show this new name - because the current name is inserted into the web page when it's served to a browser)

I realize that it's probably too much work to apply this retroactively (though not impossible), but it could be done for all new quotes.

The general point is that it's enough for some basic low-level "want to dodge that one guy who tends to show up on your websites 'coincidentally'" but not if you're planning on running for congress, or if your exboyfriend is violating his restraining order.

Which is reasonable. As reasonable as anything here can be anyway.

(edit: as in "as reasonable as anything can be, where there are arguments on either side for wanting/not wanting searchability.)

wow now no one will ever know I used to be a b̶̸̠̪̲̦͇̳̤̱͈͡r̵̗͎͙̘͕̞̞͡ͅo̸̫̺̼̠ń̵̘̭͚y̶̫̯̙̩̞͉̙̤ͅ

Knotty_Curls said:
wow now no one will ever know I used to be a b̶̸̠̪̲̦͇̳̤̱͈͡r̵̗͎͙̘͕̞̞͡ͅo̸̫̺̼̠ń̵̘̭͚y̶̫̯̙̩̞͉̙̤ͅ

how u make them fancy leddurs

Munkelzahn said:
how u make them fancy leddurs

F̢̫͔͔̤͈̮ͅa҉̢̟́ņ̡̲͉͉̖̠͕͡c̡̘̥y̷̰̯̯̟̲̱̪?̼̘̯̤͍

What about the tickets though? It's still easy to "dox" people just by using that after a name change.
Can probably be done with less than 20 lines of PHP.
Why are they even public?

Here is an ugly proof of concept of what I was talking about in the post above: [sent via dmail]
(This is purely for demonstration purposes only. I'll remove it once I'm sure an admin has seen it.)
This didn't take me long to make.

Yes, removing the history was a slight improvement, but it doesn't prevent anything. It's only a lazy-people filter, as you can see.

Either make tickets private or hide the old name for regular users would be my suggestions.

DatDraggy said:
drgn.li

What is this url? According to a google search it's a url shortener, but the result doesn't seem to be that.

(This is purely for demonstration purposes only. I'll remove it once I'm sure an admin has seen it.)
Either make tickets private or hide the old name for regular users would be my suggestions.

You could always just dmail an admin if you want to not let anybody else see it.

Furrin_Gok said:
What is this url? According to a google search it's a url shortener, but the result doesn't seem to be that.
You could always just dmail an admin if you want to not let anybody else see it.

That's my domain. It's main purpose is the url shortener (currently disabled because of bot abuse) yes, but I put the poc/ dir in it because it's short and why not.

That's true.. I'm gonna do that, thx

On the other hand, now someone can change their username to something unexpected, and no one will know when they're talking to that person unless they've memorized that person's profile particulars, which is certainly why the original "name trail" was visible. So now, in order to know who I'm talking to, I might need to check that user's old forum posts and comments? I expect requests for name changes will be hidden eventually.

I don't like this level of potential anonymity. Only, what, 0.01% users legitimately need something like this? And, of those, this isn't enough to resolve some issues.

Some positions are untenable: some issues will follow people regardless of their username. Some issues are without (e.g., stalkers, separate pornsona) and some are within (e.g., personality defects). The thing with aliasing is you can't be yourself. You need to create an alternate persona, maybe meld that into another self and therefrom have new ways to be yourself. If fear, doubt, anxiety, and self-hate drive people to alias, then the process of reinvention is probably therapeutic anyway, giving people new ways to live with themselves and their positions.

Regardless, core values and aesthetics will creep into every personal iteration; otherwise, you'll be living a lie. I expect most aren't sensitive enough to spot those values and aesthetics in others, but you take those, a "new" face's mannerisms, and their pre-existing competencies that betray experience, and from that a person can be dealiased.

Or cut out your community involvement after a name change, say less or nothing at all, defeated but safe.

Edit: Oh, yeah. Google recently released a Transparency Report (research paper) for Right to be Forgotten requests. If you live in Europe, you can put in a request here.

I'm Glad about the change It benefits me personally.

Actually glad this is gone, since I was dumb enough to use my default internet nickname instead of a 'naughty' one :'D

Knotty_Curls said:
wow now no one will ever know I used to be a b̶̸̠̪̲̦͇̳̤̱͈͡r̵̗͎͙̘͕̞̞͡ͅo̸̫̺̼̠ń̵̘̭͚y̶̫̯̙̩̞͉̙̤ͅ

Wow dude, it's been a while...you've moved all the way up to admin.
That's awesome man.

Moon_Moon said:
Wow dude, it's been a while...you've moved all the way up to admin.
That's awesome man.

I had to ritualistically kill my favorite animal for this position

NotMeNotYou said:
Got patched in late last week, and we added it because people have used our username history to dox and harass our users. There's also the problem of people signing up with their non-furry nicknames, then later realizing it might hurt their job prospects.
So we've been taking steps to alleviate those issues.

Ohh, that’s why.