Premium Membership and Changing Username

[+mstetz]

Hi,

 

I want to change my username and I have a premium membership. Will my membership transfer over somehow when I do this? In other words, is it tied to your real name and not to your geocaching userid?

 

Thanks!

 

Marty

[Keystone]

No. When you create your new account name, you will need to write to Groundspeak and ask them to transfer your premium membership from your old account over to your new account. The address is contact @ geocaching.com.

[+CSpenceFLY]

This is not aimed at the original poster as there are many posts like this.

 

I'm not sure what is up with all of the "I need to change my user name" threads. I know it says somewhere that this is not allowed. Maybe Groundspeak needs to add a step to the registration process. After you pick your username a box should pop up asking you if you are sure this is the name you want because you are not able to change it. Just a thought.

[Keystone]

Maybe a message like this:

 

This is the name that you will be known as on the site and log entries. This will be the permanent username that represents you to other members, so choose wisely!

[+Markwell]

I'm not sure what is up with all of the "I need to change my user name" threads. I know it says somewhere that this is not allowed. Maybe Groundspeak needs to add a step to the registration process. After you pick your username a box should pop up asking you if you are sure this is the name you want because you are not able to change it. Just a thought.

 

[+CSpenceFLY]

Yeah, something like that but then it pops up again after they click send. :-) Or maybe a re-enter username like the password :-)

[+mr_candyman]

I agree honestly. I can honestly see people wanting to split from their group name, but really when somebody just wants to change their username, they should have just thought harder in the first place

[+tozainamboku]

Of course at one time you could change your username. Perhaps some of these threads are people who signed up at that time and who didn't see the annoucement when this was changed.

 

Obviously, the social aspect of geocaching where teams form and breakup and even individuals who started out thinking geocaching is something they would only be doing once and awhile so the name the picked didn't matter but got more involved and now want to have a geocaching handle, means that people want to change names here more often then they might at another site. The restriction on changing names was put in because of some great new feature that required usernames be static. I'm not even sure what that great new features is - although it's rumored to be the Groundspeak Portal that is currently being used for the Waymarking forums. Frankly, since the Waymarking forums have moved to the new portal I haven't used it much. There might be some neat feature there that makes it worth giving up the ability to change a username but I haven't seen it. I don't understand why the new feature would require that usernames be locked down. I would have just added a field to the user table in the database for static username and defaulted it to the current username. Then users could continued to change their usernames and when they went to the feature that required it, the system would just look up their static name. In fact if the feature is the new portal - users with special characters in their names which the portal software didn't like could've kept their old name and the static name could've been generated by removing the special characters (assuming that it wouldn't conflict with someone else's static name). Since the TPTB didn't think of this they will now be saddled forever with threads about changing usernames and having to move premium memberships to new accounts for people who change names.

[cpacisa]

I've been wondering about this for some time now. 2+ years ago I let my wife pick out the name because it didn't seem important at the time. Since then I've gotten hooked on this sport and nobody knows how to pronounce my username so I wanted to change it to something easier (and in line with a name used on another site; the two activities knit together well).

Doesn't seem like such a big request to me.... How difficult could it be to carry-over the premium member status and the stats??

[+mstetz]

If I knew that my simple post was going to get eight replies and cause me to feel like an idiot, I wouldn't have asked. Gimme a break...

[+cache_test_dummies]

If I knew that my simple post was going to get eight replies and cause me to feel like an idiot, I wouldn't have asked. Gimme a break...

Don't let it bother you, mstetz. The replies aren't personal, it's just that this question gets asked a lot.

 

By the way, if you'd like a moderator to close this thread so no one can post to it anymore, just click the "Report" button and ask.

[+CSpenceFLY]

It is nothing personal. Just go down the list of threads and you'll see how often this comes up.

[+aminalguy]

I fully understand wanting to change a username. My husband signed us up in January and used his default username for everything...then we started caching and will always cache as a team, and we had logged several visits before I realized what a bad name our username is for TWO people. I'm figuring we're just stuck with it because I don't want my own name. That's just what happens when the husband doesn't inform the wife he's doing something so that she can think about whether you'd really want a single-sounding username for two people who refuse to cache individually. I do often wish we could change it, but it's too established now that I figure, why bother?

 

Anyway, I just thought I'd throw a somewhat legitimate reason out there for why people might occasionally want to change their username.

 

Karly

(Mrs. aminalguy )