Wow that was a lot of posts to read with very little actual discussion. Anyway here is my attempt to contribute to the parts of actual constructive discussion.
It’s even created issues for moderation, where reports for one person were meant for another player, or creating additional work because a user in a screenshot has changed their name four times since, or even it’s not the player they think but a username that looks identical.
FAF already uses a player ID, that's how you keep all the account info when you rename. When the mod team has issues, because there are ambiguous reports then we should talk about how we can base reports more on the account ID than the name. Whenever you make a report by rightclicking a username we could internally use the ID to prevent moderation problems with renames or similar names.
The rule regarding user-impersonation in particular has been criticized as vague and applied unequally, which has prompted us to review it with the moderation and administrative teams.
The attempt to remove ambiguity from the rules didn't really work, because we still have "Are difficult to distinguish from other usernames or otherwise too similar to other usernames" in the rules. That's still ambiguous. I seriously don't know where this rule draws the line. Is TheWheelie and Wheeler too similar or not? How can I as a user determine if I am breaching the rule?
Usernames that are difficult to distinguish from other usernames may no longer be used. This includes usernames that exploit visually similar characters, such as 'l', 'I', '1', 'O', and '0', or are otherwise intentionally designed to be difficult to read.
I think I understand the intention of this rule, but the way it is worded is not optimal. I am not sure what the "designed to be difficult to read" part is supposed to mean or which problem this is trying to solve. Maybe change the rule to something like
- Usernames that are visually identical to other usernames by exploiting visually similar characters are not allowed.
We will be limiting the ability to change your username to once per year. We will maintain the current policy of making previously used usernames unusable for six months, meaning that another player may not immediately pick up the name that has now been freed up. This grace period will give the community some time to get used to seeing players under a new name, and helps mitigate player-impersonation. Be aware that this means that changing your username might mean that you lose that name permanently: your old username will become available several months before you are able to rename again.
I understand the 6 month grace period and I agree with it. However the increase of the rename period to 12 months seems overly drastic and lacks good justification. Why do we need this change that you run the risk to permanently lose your original name? I don't see any reason why this would help anybody.
The rename period seems to be the main thing people have an issue with in this thread and increasing the period can only ever mitigate issues, but not eliminate them. There is some explanation, but it is quite vague. From the given explanation I don't really see why a change that affects the players so much is needed. Can't we limit rename confusion with the other rules for example the banning of identical names?
In general the rules should specify better when action will be taken. From what I read on discord it seems to be an unwritten rule that derivative names (like all the wheelies in this thread) can be punished, but only if the original name owner makes a report. This seems like a good rule, but I don't see this in the new rules. This is also relevant for other areas, for example that in-game misbehaviour can only be reported by people in the game and not outsiders.
One last thing: Discussion along the lines "do you need this feature to have fun" doesn't lead anywhere. There is hardly anything that is required to have fun. I couldn't justify why we need a faf-memes channel, but it would be sad to see it go with the justification that there were people not behaving in the channel so it is easier for moderation to remove it. It's a similar thing here. If the current situation creates issues for the moderation team then we need to talk about it, but I didn't see much of that in the justification of the change, or not detailed enough to be able to discuss possible alternatives to the current rule change.
The ability to have fun interactions with others is important for a community and the rules that we have should have clear justification why they are needed, so we can have the minimum of rules required to have an enjoyable community. "We think it is very important that usernames are unique and easy to read" is too vague for me to justify a rule that limits everyone in choosing their name.