… and don’t mind mentioning who you used to be?
seal_clubber. Tubadiva hated it and asked me to change it, so I did.
I changed it, a few years back. I changed it because I had a cyberstalker, and my username was obvious, if one knew my real name. And the stalker did, because she was also a real-world stalker.
Don’t want to say what the former name was, because she’s still around. Hopefully not stalking me anymore, but I bet she googles me once in a while.
I started out as DavmiLaSav back in the early 2000’s. I was even a paying member for a while. Then various things happened, I moved a lot, didn’t have internet access, and when I finally got back online I couldn’t remember my SD password so I changed my username.
I’d like to change this one as I’ve never really liked it.
I started out as Tiramisu because it’s my favorite dessert and it at least sounds feminine but I kept forgetting my name here because I am used to being Wile E or some variation of that so I changed it and just got used to being mistaken for a dude.
So you’re actually a cougar not a coyote? 
I’ve entertained changing mine. I never even liked it in the first place. I had a poll a couple of years back asking if I should change it, and the consensus was no.
I’d like to change it. In marketing terms, I have a brand recognition.
Not that anyone gives a shit about me, but still.
I used to be gatopescado.
Back in the old days I was known here as ChiefWahoo. I picked it semi-randomly but everyone thought I was a Cleveland Indians fan, so I changed it.
Satan was against it, but in the end I think it was the right choice.
Yer pal,
August West f/k/a ChiefWahoo
I originally joined the SDMB using my real name as my user name. I asked the admins to change it to Crotalus within a week or so of joining. My real name can be found in several ways within SDMB, but I will refrain from posting it here.
Naive me, I similarly used my real name as my User Name at first. After a while, I realized that probably wasn’t a good thing to do and at some point reregistered as Siam Sam. All well and good, until one day I got an e-mail from an admin stating that I couldn’t have two User Names and so was locked out. No idea how they figured that out, but I sent an e-mail to them explaining the situation, and they changed all my early posts to Siam Sam.
I changed the spelling of my username from **rachelellogram **to **rachellelogram **awhile ago, so it would be more technically correct–see: parallelogram.
I did consider asking for a brand-new name after I stopped being a generally embarrassing poster within the past year or so. But I’ve been here for long enough under this name that I’d rather deal with a slightly-checkered past. Especially when the alternative is people thinking the better poster I’ve become is someone else entirely. I don’t know why I’ve tied my identity up in a false name so much, but there it is.
I was first known as spooje.
I used to be Tengu.
I changed from that elsewhere AGES ago, and decided to finally make the change here not too long ago.
Yeah, they much prefer asking for a name change instead of registering twice.
By keeping your familiar name, you allow me to have a little bit of pleasure when I read one of your posts. I often think “she’s a lot more pleasant to read than she used to be.”
What - you didn’t want Dopers to know you as Ted Kaczynski? You could’ve just changed your username to Unabomber.
(I do hope it is clearly understand that I am totally joking - besides, I don’t think the real TK has internet access from prison!)
In spite of the jest, how often do you (anyone) get the impression that you’re dealing with a celebrity here? Especially the ones who have yet to self-identify as such.
Who, more than anyone else, would you be blown away by if you found out who really was behind the Username?
For me, it would probably be Stephen Hawking or Amelia Earhart.
I originally joined in 1999 and have no clue what my user name was, as I didn’t log in for a few years.
I started a thread about changing it, back when I was still in undergrad (2002-ish?) and was posting a hell of a lot more than I do now. I felt like the username gave an incorrect impression of who I was, and that it was more than a little pretentious.
Of course, then I graduated college and stopped posting nearly so much. Now I realize that pretty much no one remembers me anymore, and that therefore the verisimilitude of my digital identity here doesn’t matter nearly so much. And the name’s mine, so, fuck it, I’m not changing it.
At the time, I didn’t know about the No Multiple User Names rule. Once I registered as Siam Sam, I never used the first one again. I was a sock, but unintentionally so. Not sure how they figured that out, because usually these things come to light when a user does use multiple accounts at once.