Discord Is Forcing Everyone to Pick a New Username

pcmag.com:

Discord is changing the way usernames work, and it means absolutely everyone who uses Discord is being forced to pick a new username.

Writing on the Discord blog(Opens in a new window), CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy explains how the growing popularity of the instant messaging social platform meant "small issues that seemed to impact a few people started affecting tens of millions of people." Many of those issues are to do with the way in which usernames work.

The current username format combines a selected name with a four-digit suffix called a "discriminator." That worked just fine to a point, but Discord found sharing a username such as "phibi#8936" was error prone, not only because you could type the number wrong, but because the first part of the username is case sensistive. Therefore the usernames PhIBI#8936 and phibi#8936 are for different people.

Discord has data to back this up, stating "almost half of all friend requests fail to connect the user with the person they wanted to match with" mainly because the username was incorrect or invalid. Discord also found more than 40% of users can't remember their discriminator.

The solution to this problem is a total rethink and reset of the username system. Going forward, discriminators are being ditched completely. Users will instead pick a unique alphanumeric username formed from a combination of lowercase characters (a-z), numbers (0-9), two special characters (period and underscore), and preceded by an @ symbol. They can also select a display name which doesn't need to be unique and can include just about anything, even emojis or non-Latin characters. Discord will default your old username to be your new display name.

By forcing this change, it means