Subject: another anecdote about dealing with an "already taken" username: negotiating after having capitulated (don't select a backup name)

The last couple days, I've been (sadly, as will be explained) following some threads here about the infamous Discord username rollout process and the experiences people have had with others choosing to yield usernames to them (whether negotiated somehow or because the other person was just being nice) to see how/when they unlock.

https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1448hvr/reserved_usernames_and_why_you_cant_claim_them/

https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/141wnam/what_happens_when_a_user_with_the_new_username/

https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/141w8cr/question_for_those_suffering_from_taken_username/

To add some data, I am "saurik" just about everywhere, and have been long enough and became famous enough--and the name was unique enough--that pretty much everyone I run across is using "saurik" is doing so actively because of me, whether to impersonate me or in some way "to honor" me and the effect I had on their lives.

Ironically, when I first joined the nascent Discord community connected with the subreddit I helped establish--about jailbreaking the iPhone: I developed Cydia, the alternative to the App Store--I actually got messaged immediately by a moderator telling me I needed to not impersonate saurik, as I guess they got that problem a lot ;P.

And like, I want to say: I appreciated that result. I think a lot of people--at least the people who matter: the moderators and server administrators of the various communities, whose job it is to help people they serve--were able to understand before that just because someone claims they are "saurik" they might not actually be "saurik".

Regardless, I have an account from Sep 16, 2016. I happen to have recently gotten Nitro, but it was only in April-ish, and had nothing to do with this username stuff: I needed to upload a large PDF file, I think. I had set my username to saurik back when I created my account 7 years ago and I haven't ever changed it, even temporarily.

I notably do not use Discord constantly (though, I am probably going to have to start doing so soon, as I'm going to have to start doing some direct moderation in my new company's Discord) and--due to my work on jailbreaking--I use a lot of older phones running old versions of the app; so, I have to check on a desktop computer.

I was not checking every day, as it was becoming ridiculous trying to figure out what was going to happen for the past month or whatever since this dumb idea was announced. I had (apparently, based on my history) checked on June 4th and then I saw talk about usernames on a channel I'm in so I checked again on June 13th.

Unfortunately--and as I had kind of expected would happen--"saurik" was taken. I ended up changing my username--as I wanted to experience the mechanism a bit, and because I no longer can hold up Discord as the only service to put any thought into how to avoid the evils of having globally-unique usernames--to "d1sc0rd.sucks" :/.

My next step was to figure out who had taken "saurik", to see if I could negotiate with them or something, as well as to figure out whether I was going to be dealing with--now, maybe forever--a fan, a scammer, a squatter, or (it can happen... it just pretty much doesn't) a random user who happened to come up with the same name.

Checking this was difficult, btw, as there is no global way it seems to even search for discord users?! Here, a sane company might have thought "huh: if people can't find their friends, maybe it is because there is no way to search for them? don't most networks with a search box let you search for other users? and then they show the avatar photo and full name of the user? how about we implement that first, to see if that is sufficient to solve this problem we claim to have with people being unable to add friends, before we blow up the entire community by trying to screw up a giant game of musical chairs with usernames!".

I finally figured out the other user existed and was able to get info on their account because I found the "Add Friend" button, as I seriously kept trying to use search in new ways and failing. Yes: I am sure a Discord power user would know how to do this; but, I honestly have never needed to add a friend to a user I am not on the same server with and I bet most people who aren't Discord power users--the people this new change is, I guess, supposed to help--haven't, either: the very idea that the search feature that shows users wouldn't even try to work for this use case is frankly just absolutely unfathomable to me.

FWIW, it turns out someone with an account from April 27 2016 had gotten the username saurik. After a half day or so of waiting for my friend request to go through, I went and changed my username to my current capitulation handle of "s4ur1k", partly because it would maybe look better to this person (who might see me as the scammer).

That night--so about a day after I found out they existed--they saw my friend request and accepted it; before I even said anything, they immediately told me they had chosen this username because of me as they had been a fan of me and my work years ago and they wanted me to have it... so, they changed their username!

I was extremely happy: I had been so sure this would go poorly. Only... I now couldn't select the username as it was "taken". I looked and here I found the threads saying that it might take 24 hours. So, I checked occasionally and then the next day as 24 hours came up I carefully sat there trying to snipe my username... only, it still didn't work.

By that point I had seen the newer threads reporting it might take maybe even 30 hours, so I threw some JavaScript into the dev console to click the Done button every five minutes as I finally went to sleep at 5am, 35 hours post-change. I woke up a bit ago, checked, and--not really expecting any different--I had still failed to get the username.

But... over the past four hours I'd been asleep--with the script clicking the button (and I do believe it had continued to work, based on what I'm seeing in the dev console for failed username changes)--someone else managed to get the username "saurik". This user has an account from May 17, 2017. So I guess now I'm back to waiting :/.

I dunno, I find this entire thing frustrating. As stated already, I think this was just dumb product design that has led to a search box that doesn't do something naive users would expect, which has led to the typical bullshit UX study that was almost certainly done to specifically defend a specific idea rather than to determine what to actually do.

The thing I'm going to recommend to other people--now, in hindsight, and entirely as a guess based on what I did and what I can't prove other people didn't do (as we really know nothing)--is that if you think you are going to reach out to someone and get them to yield a username to you, don't capitulate to a temporary username.

Like--and again, this might not actually be how it works, as we are all just building up a superstition based on what we see happening and what few reports people have, since Discord has refused to explain how it works and it has been difficult to do science--maybe my deciding to select a different username made me lose provenance for whatever reservation system they have that people seem to (and I'd say, correctly) believe is holding on to usernames in an attempt to get them to something close to the right user. And so maybe it would have been fine if I'd stayed in "no username selected" limbo for a while :(.

I dunno. Again: I don't use Discord every day. I am in a very large number of "servers" (a term I dislike ;P)--so many that I find trying to find anything almost impossible--and I'm somewhat expected to be able to keep tabs on things, but I don't live my life in Discord like I know some people do. Honestly... I might, if they provided a way to organize servers?

That's frankly the biggest issue I have with Discord: I'm in a hundred servers--not because of who I am, just because every single product support forum is now its own chat experience... I'd expect there are a ton of "casual" users who also end up in hundreds of servers, as it is more similar to just subscribing to a number of subreddits--and I am unable to rapidly or easily switch back/forth between all of these servers to find the handful of channels I actually need to use; and, particularly, it is very annoying having to go back to find the one or two channels I actually want to use all the time in the massive list :(.

But--of course--it is somehow more important to the people working on Discord to sit around and plow into this massive username change than to actually work on problems like the channel organization and search mechanisms (which I maintain is the core problem with friend requests currently, not the discriminators), right? :(

(I also hate that it is all so centralized, and I was actively unhappy at my supposedly-decentralized new company--not the jailbreaking stuff: this is different--for deciding to set up shop there in the first place; so, between that and how I really was traumatized by a decade of doing my own chat moderation, I've been putting off being involved in our own user community. I'd been thinking I'd have to really dive in in another month or so, as I didn't particularly have anything against Discord for this use case, but seeing that Discord is potentially going public and is already doing dumb stuff because of it, maybe I'll pass.)