Increase username length restriction from 15 to 25 characters

[fiddlingfrog]

Title
Increase username length restriction from 15 to 25 characters

Short, concise description of the idea
Change the restriction on username length so that users can create accounts, communities, and syndicated feeds that have names up to 25 characters long.

Full description of the ideaThere are numerous suggestions regarding deleting unused/old

Comments

[soph]

Actually Dreamwidth made the change before closed beta, meaning that *nobody* had access except for Mark and Denise, and the server could be rebuilt if necessary.

It really isn't the sort of thing easily changed on a running site; it would definitely require downtime of some sort; I'm not sure how long, but potentially a while.

[charliemc]

And most of us here at LiveJournal are never in favor of downtime! So...

[azurelunatic]

If this were to be done, I wonder if it could be done in segments, and/or during an already-existing major downtime that was mandated by working on hardware. (Like, replacing switches or something.)

[soph]

The biggest problem with any of this is that a huge amount of testing would be required before this could go live on LJ, since there are tons of active users. Also, the code DW uses might have changed since this was patched; I don't *believe* there's been anything that needed changed but it's something to bear in mind.

As for doing it in segments, that'd probably require use of a new dversion, and correspondingly, changes would need to be made to distinguish between one and the other. The rename script would need to know if the cluster you were on was 25-character aware, etc, and more code needs to be written that would need testing, and so on.

[pauamma]

You can't do it in segments. The username-to-id mapping table is global, IIRC.

[andy]

Not after global moved to FusionIO, I think. :p