I think this is very much a question with no clear answer. However, I understand that user names can’t be replicated or recycled.
What about how similar user names can be? This could be difficult with the software available, but how similar does a user name have to be before it is disallowed?
We have had recently Cesario - that was a real treat, being confused with him.
Now I see an MTCicero- once again the confusion could occur. (I am not complaining about MTCicero- he/ she obviously has great tastes).
This is purely a guess, but such things are tolerated in CS (or were last I tried one), but I would speculate that as long as one character is added to, removed from, or changed in an already accepted name, the new name is seen as different and thus accepted by the software.
I do know there’s a zeldarae, and when I do a vanity search on zeldar, other options appear before I finish typing mine in.
I’ll yield to a better, or more nearly official, version, but at least you do have “an answer.”
When I first joined, I signed up with the user name “Hypnotoad”. I was politely asked to change the user name to something different because of a current user having a very similar name (Hypno-toad).
Made perfect sense to me, and I was happy to oblige, but I’m not sure if it was reported or if a mod noticed it, or what.
I would think that anyone with a lot of repeating characters would be run into problems. On one of my other boards we have a mod with the username ollllllo, someone could impersonate him easily adding or subtracting an l. Well, not easily since the big huge MODERATOR sign wouldn’t be there, but you know what I mean. I think there was problems on the Fark forum with someone impersonating “Shut…up” by signing up with a username of “Shut…up”
Honestly, the only real answer is to hear from the higher ups.
We try to avoid names that are so similar they’re likely to be confusing, but there’s no objective definition of confusing. If we see a new poster who has almost the same name as someone else we’ll probably ask them to change it. monster, monstre, and monstro are all longtime users here, so it’s not something we deal with very much.
It can crop up unexpectedly. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to keep Argent Foxtrot and Agent Towers separate, but God help me, it’s impossible.
Honestly, I thought you’d changed your name to MTCicero… also, there’s Cisco too, which is quite similar to your username.
Obviously it’s a “each situation is different” thing, but seeing as most of the usernames now have “Guest” underneath them with no location readily visible to help differentiate posters with similar names, it might be an issue that bears a little more thinking about.
I saw a thread today started by a Mnem, who has apparently been here since 2003 but has very few posts. I could see a problem happening if we both started to post in the same thread, given how people tend to shorten my username to mnem. I’m not sure it’s worth asking her(?) to change, though. There are other mnem-somethings that show up in search, but most, if not all, don’t post any more.
Now that we have custom titles, we could use those to address the problem. Cicero could have changed his to “The Non-Kiddy Diddler” or “Only Attracted to Adults since 1973” or whatnot.
