liquidsnakehpks: Gog allowing users to change their names is good but how will people know who the person was before ? unless in specific conditions like the person was in chat or some thread most people wont know who it is.
How about adding the feature that steam has ? people in steam can change their use name countless times but you can see their history of name changes. This way people will know for example
lacko1111 -> ne_zevarj -> Painted_Doll
now how many people knew that ?
As you may know, I am not a great fan of waiting for GOG to implement things that we as a community can do for ourselves. GOG's priorities are very different from the community and frankly waiting for them to act on things is imho a waste of time.
Each GOG user has a user ID, which I am pretty sure does not change when a new name is assumed. You can see anyone's ID by, for example, right clicking their avatar and selecting "Inspect Element" (at least on Firefox and Chrome). A panel opens and a couple lines above the selected element one can read something like
<span... gog-user="
31983491820">. That is the user ID.
All someone needs to do is write a small program that creates a database of ID-to-name (e.g. by scanning all the posts in the last, say, 100 threads). Then run this program once a day or once a week and identify changes.
I myself don't see a problem with people changing their names and the ne_zavarj to Painted_Doll rather obvious change (how many four-star Hungarians do we have, after all?) does not bother me in any way. I don't see anything nefarious about it.
If someone feels the need to out such name changes, the solution is simple, as I have outlined above. I for one prefer to offer people the sense of make-believe anonymity.