Can we restrict the ability of users to keep changing their names?

Question

Obviously one of the things that this site encourages is the building up of reputation which is a reflection of how the community perceives you. However, after spending a while in any given tag, you can't help but get familiar with people by their SO user name and interpret their input accordingly. This is especially the case with comments: you have to click-through to the user's home page as their rep is not immediately visible.

Hence it's pretty confusing when certain users keep changing their names:

• Is that someone who I have learnt to respect?
• Is that trollish behaviour, or has the user made a genuine error/comunication problem?
• Do I give this user the benefit of any doubt?

I must say that I find this is particularly the case on meta. I'm not suggesting that user-names should be permanently locked but perhaps there could be a limit to how often a name could be changed (e.g. no more than once per quarter year).

Answer 1

New rules:

• only one display name change is allowed every 30 days
• user accounts less than 2 days old may change their display name at will
• there is a 15 minute grace period after each change during which you may change your display name at will

Answer 2

Personally, I found it much more confusing when certain users who had gone months under one name suddenly switched to new names (and, in at least one case, new gravatar images).

Rate-limiting would do nothing to prevent this, but banning name-changes outright would hamper those who picked unfortunate pseudonyms, were poorly-named by their parents, or decide to change their names out of some misguided ideas of transparency.

So I suggest one small change: keep a list of past pseudonyms attached to each user's bio somewhere. Let them decay over time, perhaps dropping old names after a month or so.

Answer 3

Though it's incredibly annoying, I'm reluctant to support a restriction on this. The questions and answers should feature and stand by themselves. It's a Q&A site, and as such WHO is posting the answer (and whether they were the same yesterday) isn't as important as the answer itself.

Answer 4

The frequent name-changing seems only to be the case on meta, and I'm finding it quite amusing: aside from the meme which provides humour value in its own right, I'm finding it a good exercise to take every comment on its own merits rather than my perception being coloured with my mental image of the author in question.

Answer 5

Why?

Really.

1. Has it been a problem outside of meta?

   1. The ones that do it on meta, know who each others are, and know enough to look at the profile after each unexpected change.
   2. Those who come from the outsidestackoverflow, don't really care who you are, because for them you are John Doe.
   3. If you want to know the standard nick of a user, just look at the assosiated accounts.

2. Why should I have a cost assosiated if I were to want to use my real name?

3. What if another user signs in with the same name and I want to distinguish myself outside of my gravatar, should I pay up?

4. You are no fun anymore!

Answer 6

How about having it cost reputation to change your name more than once per day? Say 100 points per name change. This doesn't restrict the user from making any changes and doesn't penalize any user making legitimate changes, but it does discourage name changes for the sake of name changes.