Indie Game Studio Unable to Reserve Their Name Under Discord's New Username System

[Fouquin]

Earlier this month Discord announced that they would be rolling out a new username system that removes the 4-digit discriminator at the end of the current usernames. This change enforces that each user name is unique, and no copies of a specific spelling can exist on the platform. Discord claims this change is being made in part because they've noticed that almost half of all friend requests on the platform fail to reach the intended accounts. The problems with this change are probably immediately evident to most of you, as the platform has over 200 million active accounts, and the statistical probability of multiple people wanting to claim the same name is astronomical.

Rusty Lake, an indie game studio based in Amsterdam and creators of Cube Escape and The Path Within games, experienced the primary issue with the new system first hand: username theft. While Discord gave the company an advanced reservation to pick their username, Rusty Lake found that another user had already claimed their name. On Twitter Rusty Lake posted about the issue and issued a warning to other indie developers using Discord for their communities,

We just received an email that we, as Verified Owners, could finally submit a new username and wow... 'rustylake' is already taken! If we as a server owner with 240K+ members can't even claim it… [...] Now we have a risk of impersonation + extra legal costs to file a possible trademark infringement. In any case
[Discord] was helpful enough to respond with an automatic response email to this issue and the follow up is directing us to another helpdesk.

After posting about their username issues last week they posted a follow up earlier today that stated they had still not heard back from anyone at Discord about their problem, and at this time the issue remains unresolved. This scenario has reportedly played out for other high-profile users such as popular YouTube personalities Markiplier, PewDiePie, and others. Discord did step in on those occasions to reverse the reservations and award the appropriate usernames to those high profile users.

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[sam_86314]

It's almost like this was a bad idea...

 

[Space Lynx]

who cares if people don't get their right friend on the first try... most people know by now about the 4 numbers at the end, even my niece does and she is in middle school.

this entire decision was probably based off bots doing stupid shit.

huge oversight and mistake here by Discord imo. seriously, how do these people make six figures and i make a pittance? bloody nonsense if you ask me

 

[ZoneDymo]

Drama about nothing

 

[Dr. Dro]

Discord isn't known for making good decisions. They should just own this one up as a mistake and withdraw the plans to deploy this. No one I spoke to liked the idea, absolutely no one. I have a close friend that owns a very sought-after tag since November 2015, he says that if he doesn't lose it (and he believes he will), hes going to get harassed 24/7 for people looking to buy his account. And I think he's right about that.

Their support is abysmal and if you get banned/raided for any reason, they will not help you, all you'll be met with is automated denial emails.

Drama about nothing

It's quite important, if anyone created the drama it was Discord with this genius idea of theirs. Not.

 

[Fouquin]

Drama about nothing

Alright, so say I've now claimed ZoneDymo on Discord. I'm now you. Maybe I go and post heinous trash, affiliate the account name with said heinous trash, and you are powerless to stop me because Discord clearly does not care to handle these matters unless you have 10M+ followers. People start finding your name elsewhere, going, "Hey you're that dude who spews heinous trash all over Discord, you're a real piece of shit." Or they dox you, SWAT your house, DDOS you. You know, general internet bully stuff.

In effect that identity has now been hijacked, you're being harassed due to it, and you can do nothing but change your online identity all because some friend invites were being sent to the wrong accounts.

Now imagine you're running a small company account, or a group with a following and somebody hijacks that identity and starts undermining your work, lying to your customers, social engineering their way into your support networks, etc. Discord is not just some small startup alternative to Teamspeak and Skype these days, it's an established huge social network. These changes are going to affect people, these changes ARE affecting people.

 

[aciDev]

Sloppy idea removing the discriminator digits. Welcome usernames with digits and Xs in them..

 

[Vayra86]

Didn't we get those digits at some point precisely to fix the problem that they're having now? What the f

 

[chrcoluk]

As soon as I seen this on the news I knew it was a daft idea.

One thing I thought was good about discord was the digits after the username, and I was like wtf when I read about it, why get rid of such a good system, they could have added mechanisms to help on the DM issue.

Didnt know they already rolling out the new names though, the news report said it wouldnt be until later in the year.

 

[Chomiq]

Didnt know they already rolling out the new names though, the news report said it wouldnt be until later in the year.

Nope, it's coming soon.

It's going to be a clustermuck.

 

[chrcoluk]

How is a name already taken then? They got some kind of pre launch VIP grab or something?

Yeah I look forward to my name been a load of random stuff as everything resembling my name will be gone, rather than just some greyed out digits after the name.

 

[tpa-pr]

Discord isn't known for making good decisions. They should just own this one up as a mistake and withdraw the plans to deploy this. No one I spoke to liked the idea, absolutely no one. I have a close friend that owns a very sought-after tag since November 2015, he says that if he doesn't lose it (and he believes he will), hes going to get harassed 24/7 for people looking to buy his account. And I think he's right about that.

Their support is abysmal and if you get banned/raided for any reason, they will not help you, all you'll be met with is automated denial emails.



It's quite important, if anyone created the drama it was Discord with this genius idea of theirs. Not.

Agreed, I am trying desperately to move my friends off Discord onto Signal. It's been questionable decision after questionable decision especially when it comes to security and privacy. And the fact that they won't (or can't) do something as simple as move their desktop client to a newer version of Electron brings their development chops into question too.

Discord has always been an anomaly to me. It's one of the few chat platforms I can recall that just sort of sprung up out of nowhere and suddenly became the default overnight. And the fact that a lot of artists and developers are making their content Discord exclusive means we are going to lose a lot of content when it inevitably goes the way of the dodo.

 

[qlum]

Unless some clown takes my name Ill probably be fine, still this sounds li
ke a stupid change to implement on a mature platform. The better option would be to allow for an unique alias.

As for trademark claims, they may not work if the person or group that took it is not a game studio.

 

[WorringlyIndifferent]

Sloppy idea removing the discriminator digits. Welcome usernames with digits and Xs in them..

xXxLinkinParkxXx420

Seriously though this is obviously going to cause huge problems and already is. Unsurprising though, for every change move Discord has made, they make 20 bad ones. The only good change I can think of in the pas 3 years was the addition of the soundboard, because it's funny. Everything else has been questionable, at best.

 

[RandomWan]

They're still using Squirrel years later. Stupid ideas like this are par for the course.