Do not allow moderator candidates to change their user names during elections

Question

Some background: Why was this comment chain removed from the moderator questionnaire?: A candidate in the moderator election on SO recently changed her user name to make a statement about something that was mostly discussed on Meta SE.

Normally the people of main site of Stack Overflow do not participate on Meta. They don't know what goes on here, who says what, who supports whom and who is against whom.

It is very dangerous if a candidate changes their name during elections to support what they were previously against about. Whatever their intentions might be, this is a breach of trust on their part. Votes can sway in their favour because majority of main SO users do not follow discussions on meta. They may simply see the new username of the candidate and assume something which may not be true.

I do not want such name changes possible in the elections. Elections cannot be unbiased this way.

Answer 1

To say it with Heretic Monkey's words: Please yes, implement that because changing user names of candidates during elections can be confusing.

Voters rely on the name to identify people and they may check in at various times during the election and if then the names of the candidates change that could lead to situations where people cannot find anymore a candidate they wanted to vote for or just get confused about the identity of the candidate. I think this is a real possibility while I don't really see any big disadvantages of not being able to change the user name for a few days.

Make it a rule, write it down when announcing new elections and rollback manually if needed.

Answer 2

Name changes during the election should be allowed. Like Makoto I can imagine plenty of innocent reasons to change a username.

I wouldn't object tying username changes during elections to some rules though. The ones described in Let's disallow moderator nominations from people who've been suspended in the past year could work.

Make sure name changes don't:

• lead to speculation and personal attacks.
• leave insufficient opportunity to demonstrate good faith.
• distract everyone from the most important question in any election: who will make a good moderator?

Users can flag posts of people whose username they deem inappropriate, I would say if things like this arise, flagging if the username change meets the above requirements again makes more sense than outright banning all username changes.

Moderators can review flags and reset usernames. If they don't want to touch it/don't know if it should be touched, they can ask for guidance from Community Managers (assuming there's still one or two overseeing active elections, actively). If the name isn't changed, I think something similar to part of this answer applies:

If the nomination is allowed to continue, folks are going to just have to trust that we (the Community Growth team) reviewed everything there is to review and determined that the user shouldn't have been suspended.

In other words, if you've flagged the name change and it's allowed to stand, trust that it's been reviewed and that it's been determined to not be detrimental (enough) to the election going on.

Answer 3

I would disallow (or for a less bureaucratic setup: roll back when needed) name changes that somehow deceive voters. A name is meant to be the identifying mark and if the name change tries to circumvent that, it should have no place in an election.

For example, if Alice where running for Moderator and someone posts "hey, wasn't it Alice who did the bad thing?" and suddenly Alice changes her name to Barbara, so people forget about the bad thing, because it's associated with Alice. That's deception, that should not be allowed.

However, the candidate in question is very much just as identifiable as before in our case. Alice renamed herself to "Alice-SaveTheWhales" so to speak. Whether she actually wants to save whales, well, that's up to the voter to figure out. But I see no harm in this change, the purpose of a "name" as identifier is preserved, nobody is deceived about who is running.

Answer 4

I'm going to take the Devil's Advocate approach and throw this out there as a reason why this might not work.

Suppose you've been using a pseudonym, and as a part of your wanting to become a moderator, you decide/announce/proclaim that you're going to change to using your name, or a different pseudonym. Should that be disallowed if it's a circumstance in which someone innocently wants to be referred to as something else?

The reason I want to support this is that if a name is changed to something which stokes polarizing emotions, or continues/perpetuates an argument, that could be seen as a problem. But, I can't disagree that there's an innocent usage which could get trampled on here.

Answer 5

If a user modifies or changes their username it is up to them.

–as long as the username is not offensive and does not slander anyone–

The same principle applies to a candidate regardless if that change occurs during a moderator election.

It is very dangerous if a candidate changes their name during elections to support what they were previously against about.

First of all, the candidate did not change their username, they added a tagline. As long as a candidate remains identifiable, tagging a slogan shouldn't make any difference and there is nothing “dangerous“ about it. Moreover, completely changing a username during an election is counterproductive, a candidate wants to be recognised.

The OP's blatant mistrust of the candidate may or may not be warranted but one thing is clear though, that ‘political’ statement during the election period has backfired on the candidate. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, let them do so. Even the simple act of changing or modifying a username during an election provides significant insight into the candidate's personality and/or their stance on a position.

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Consider this: SE decides to roll back the recently modified username, and… cue uproar from community. Accusations of censorship, blocking free speech, double standard, questions on whether it violates CoC etc. etc.

The Community Managers and moderators on Stack Overflow did absolutely fine not to intervene. Sometimes it pays to step back and allow nature to take its course.

UPDATE
I checked the election page, and noticed that the candidate's username no longer carries the familiar slogan of last year. I have no idea how, when, or who instigated this change.

Response:

The name was changed back by the user themselves. No moderators or staff were involved @Cody Gray

2nd UPDATE
The candidate's request to delete their account on Stack Exchange has been granted.

Answer 6

To handle potential issues of confusion while allowing users the same freedom to change their name, could we handle it similar to this proposal for handling prior moderator suspensions? Just have a disclosure area for prior names, quite possibly populated directly from the database. For example, this could look like:

Hello, my name is Cooldood1995 and I would like to be your moderator.

I'm really awesome and I fart rainbow unicorn sparkles. I also never perspire and can recognize spam seven out of ten times if I have a head start. Here's some other stuff about me....

Cooldood1995 was known as John554 from 15.05.2017 to 02.01.2019.

Cooldood1995 was known as SupportTheCauseCAUSE from 02.01.2019 to 03.08.2019.

Cooldood1995 was known as CauseIsTheGreatestCauseSupportMe from 03.08.2019 to 01.01.2020.

Cooldood1995 was known as Cooldood1995 from 01.01.2020 to present.

Answer 7

If a candidate wants to change name to distance themself from some of their actions in the past, why do you think they'll do it during the election, not before it? As your proposal simply won't work if the candidate renames themself before election, I suppose there is no sense in implementing it.

Just look and revert manually. Renaming for non-moderators is limited by one time per month as I recall.