I was thinking of asking to change my id in order to be a bit more “semi-anonymous”, and I know I’m supposed to ask the Administrators nicely for that, but in the absence of a members list, how do I pick something to ask for?
Am I allowed to create a temporary guest account for the sole purpose of checking whether an id is taken, and then just 'fess up that I did that when I ask to be renamed?
You can find which variants of a name are taken by doing a search on a partial user name- Uncheck the “exact name” box under search by user name, type in a few characters from the name you want, and search for threads from any date.
The search returns a list of all the names it found at the top of the results page. For example a search for user names with ‘bishop’ in them returned:
So the chances are good that you could change your name to JoeyBishop without irritating a pre-existing JBishop.
Pick Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen!
Squink, will that return a name which has registered but never posted? There are a great many of those… Last I knew, about a third of our total registered membership had zero posts.
You can also tell the Admin what name you want, and she’ll tell you if it’s already taken. Or you could prepare a list of usernames, in order of preference, and give that to the admin.
And he can’t choose Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen, since that’s 28 characters long.
It shouldn’t. That’s why I said “chances are good”. It’ll let you eliminate ~2/3 of the member names.
Submit a list of your choices, in order. Search as per Squink’s suggestion, and we’ll go from there.
Okly-Dokly. I’ll get my imagination in gear and get back to you by e-mail.
Thanks
“Neha Agarwal” registered as a guest today. I did a search for “water” with a partial user name of “wal”. “Neha Agarwal” showed up on the list of members searched and had zero posts before and after the search.
I’ve also found users with zero posts.
Having more than one user account is frowned upon at the SDMB.
From the Registration agreement:
I knew that. That’s why I asked the specific question about creating one for the sole purpose of figuring out what I wanted to rename myself to. However, others have indicated the better way to check names.
Cool! Thanks CK! Didn’t realize that the rename would automagically affect all my old posts, but that’s even better.
PS In case it’s not obvious to someone just stumbling onto the thread, CK Dexter Haven renamed me as I asked, and all the posts fom me in this thread (as well as everywhere else I guess) reflect the new name.
Interestingly, the forum page also lists the new name for thread starter. I don’t think that used to be the case.
Is it okay to ask what your former name was?
Just curious.
dmartin… I still prefer Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen…if that’s too long, why not just Schnackenpfefferhausen?
It looks like somebody already has it anyway…
No, other than the fact that it approximated my real name.
I also adjusted my location to my province only and turned off e-mail messages. I’m actually not overly concerned about someone finding out my old id (otherwise I would never have registered than way in the first place); however since I went to the trouble of “semi-anonymizing” 
myself, I might as well be consistent.
I think this topic is pretty much used up for ATMB forum – question was asked, answered, and adjusted by Administrators. If you’d like to continue conversation, let us know, and we’ll move it to the MPSIMS forum.