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

[azurelunatic]

This came up previously in 2003: http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/431070.html

Points from that discussion:
This would require tweaks to existing styles to accommodate the longer usernames, particularly as some do not handle even 15-character names well.
In 2004, there reportedly still existed tables in the database that the user was referred to by name, and not number (!!!), and it is unknown to me if any of those still exist; if so, those would need to be changed. (Simply updating the allowed length of a field could cause LJ to need to be down, or read-only, while that is going on, and the more users there are the longer that would take.)

[jai_dit]

Well, DW also did a lot of changing to their database schema, so the patch isn't really indicative of what would have to happen on LJ.

[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.

[charliemc]

It sounds as if it would be a can of worms to accomplish. (sigh)

That said, I wish it was at least a 20-character allowance -- and 25 would be dandy!

Too bad it wasn't done from the get-go. Nice suggestion. But if it's going to be a TON of trouble to do, well...

[lady_angelina]

Agreed. It would be a very nice ponie to have, but yeah, way more trouble than it'd be worth.

Fifteen-character usernames aren't that bad. They just require a little ingenuity on the part of the journal creator. Though it'd help immensely if name-squatting were discouraged...

[jai_dit]

I think 25 characters is actually too long. I get annoyed when I have to type out a 15-character username, so it would be worse with the potential for longer usernames.

Also, another drawback (like for any expansion of possible usernames) is increased ability for account spoofing.

[jai_dit]

Well, if you increase the number of usernames it is possible to create, that's more potentially similar usernames that can be created. Of course, given that it's an increase in length, it's less likely to cause confusion by looking similar, but there's the chance that the username could be misleading.

[mordyn4]

My only concern is that longer usernames wouldn't work well in my layout, lol.

But I bet there's a lot of layouts it wouldn't work too well in.

[fiddlingfrog]

Even if this were implemented today the vast majority of usernames would still be under 15 characters. I imagine there'd be plenty of time to adjust layouts before the impact became too severe.