[ysavir]

I think that's essentially what they're doing. Currently "usernames" in the discord context are equivalent to display names. You can change your username at any time so long as 9999 other people don't already have the name your going for. With this change, you're getting a permanent identifier in the form of a username, while you retain your display name, which you can still change at any time, but now without having to worry about whether you're the 10000th person to get it.

[thaumasiotes]

> Currently "usernames" in the discord context are equivalent to display names.

This is not correct. There is a username associated with your account. It's used in friend requests.

Display names are an entirely separate concept; they exist on a per-server basis. The same discord account can have many different display names at once. When you join a server, your display name on that server defaults to the part of your username before the numeric tag. But you're free to set it to whatever you want.

[ysavir]

> Display names are an entirely separate concept; they exist on a per-server basis. The same discord account can have many different display names at once. When you join a server, your display name on that server defaults to the part of your username before the numeric tag. But you're free to set it to whatever you want.

Yes, but you have to manually set those. You default to your proper username. My understanding from the blog post is that now it will default to your display name, and that the username will be for identification scenarios.

[Dylan16807]

> now without having to worry about whether you're the 10000th person to get it

Which is trivial to fix with another digit, and not the reason they're doing this massive change.

[saghm]

Maybe I'm, getting confused by the messaging then; the article talks about "forcing people to make a change", which to me implies that this is some sort of transition where eventually the "old" names will no longer work, or at least that using a custom nickname per server won't work. If that's the case, then I don't consider this to be done in a "non-breaking way", although maybe I wasn't specific enough in my previous comment.

[ysavir]

Yeah, if I'm understanding it correctly, the word choice and communication really muddy the waters. If they chose to call it "unique identifier", and treat is a brand new value, I think there would be much less confusion and frustration. "Username" is too overloaded in this context for it to have been communicated clearly.