On Tuesday, September 15, 2009, at about 10:00am GMT, SQLServerCentral will be making an update to our codebase and database to ensure that we have unique usernames for all members of the community. This should not affect your email or password used to log in.
The change will be implemented as follows:
- All duplicate user names will have a dash followed by a random number appended to the and of the user name. i.e. "Steve Jones" might be changed to "Steve Jones - 43523"
- The user that joined first will retain their original user name, and those that have joined later and duplicated names will have a number added.
You are free to change your username in your profile page to anything else, as long as your choice is not in use.
Why are we doing this?
When we upgraded the codebase a few years ago, the code did not check for duplicate user names, only email addresses. This was an ovesight, and recently we have begun seeing some duplicate user names posting in the forums. This has confused some people, and annoyed others.
This has not been a problem in the past, but to prevent confusion in the future, we have decided to implement this change. A unique constraint will be added to the database(s) to ensure this is not a problem in the future.
We apologize for any inconvenience, and feel free to contact the webmaster with questions or post them in the discussion for this article.