Username was changed on me

[John_P1]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but today when I logged in I noticed that my username is now John_P1 instead of John_P.  Trying to change it back results in a message indicating that the name John_P is already taken.

I have been using John_P for a little over 4 years now (most of this time as an NI employee), is there any way to get my username back?

EDIT:  I just noticed that I have been registered for EXACTLY 4 years as of 9/9/2012.  Could the name reset somehow coincide with my 4 year anniversary on the forum?  Or maybe this is just a coincidence.

Best Regards,

[RavensFan · Accepted solution]

The change occurred because of this.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/Feedback-on-NI-Discussion-Forums/Reputation-Sync/td-p/1867191

Are you saying you have been using John_P and it changed to John_P1?  My understanding is that if you had been using John P  (with a space) that would convert it to a John_P.  I imagine if the John_P was already taken, then the changeover would have picked another variation that wasn't taken.

You may want to contact an forum moderator to see if they can fix this for you.

It looks like the John_P that exists in the forum first logged in on June 9, 2008 at 1:31 PM.  And the last time they logged in was that same day at 1:32 PM, no messages ever posted.  So that person basically doesn't exist and it shouldn't be an issue having a moderator change that username to something else.

(Interesting note, I searched Users for "John_" to see how many there were.  There were 57 users.  All of them made sense except for the first one alphabetically which was "Andromeda".  How did that user get caught up in my search?)  (See attached screenshot.)

[John_P1]

Oh good call, it was actually a space before.  I wasn't aware of the change, thanks for sharing!  I have forwarded this thread to a moderator, I'll see if I can switch over to John_P.  Or... perhaps this would be a good opportunity to get more creative with my username.

Best Regards,

[JordanG]

Hey John,

RavensFan is absolutely correct in the logic. Spaces were first replaced with underscores "_" and if a conflict existed, a numeric was added to the end beginning with 1. You should've received an email from NI Corporate last Monday informing you of the change. Of course if you would like to edit your alias you can do that at ni.com/profile.

Hope that helps!

Jordan 

[elset191]

Is deleting 'ghost members', as Ravens Fan suggested, an option?  If so I would like to eliminate elset and usurp the alias.

[JordanG]

Hi RavensFan,

In your advanced search you were searching all three areas of User Login, Biography, and Rank by default. When I searched "john_" in the "With all the words field", Andromeda and Ben both showed up in my list. If you view their profiles you see both of their biographies contain the word "John<space>". This seems to be why they are showing up in your search results. When you choose to find results in User Login only, neither Ben nor Andromeda show up in the results list.

However, when I search for john_ in the field "With the exact phrase" I receive 3 results (including Ben and Andromeda). It seems that when searching the biography section all "_" are interpretted as spaces. I am engaging with our forums vendor to see why _ is interpretted as a space when searching biographies.

Jordan

[Wolfgang]

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@JordanG wrote:

...Spaces were first replaced with underscores "_" ...

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It is interesting to see that even after this change there are user names with a space , see e.g. @Wolfgang Weber or @Al_S

[JordanG]

Yes, there will still be users whose alias appears to have a space. The change has already been made in the NI database and the changes will visually propogate through the next time the user logs in.