Hello,
today, I discovered that when an user gets renamed, the ping suggester in DiscussionTools still suggests the old username, which will cause the pinged person to miss pings.
For instance, if user A participated in a discussion, later got renamed to "Renamed user", and I use the at sign char to start the ping suggester, the Discussion Tools will still suggest User A.
Would it be possible to fix this use case somehow?
Thanks,
Martin
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T295507 Improve the accuracy of Discussiontools's username suggestion list | |||
| Open | None | T267839 Ping suggester suggests wrong username when a user gets renamed |
@Urbanecm, interesting case – thank you for filing this.
To make sure I am understanding the issue accurately, in stating "...when an [sic] user gets renamed..." are you referring to what this section describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy#Changing_your_username ?
When generating the reply links, all we have is the username as written in the wikitext; we don't really know the "identity" of the user who made the comment.
Actually following a rename seems difficult, given that the logs for it are on a separate wiki (Meta). It might even be undesirable for "vanished" users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Courtesy_vanishing), or when someone else has registered a new account under the original username.
However… maybe we should just follow redirects on the user page? This might have some unexpected consequences too (e.g. for bot or sockpuppet accounts maybe?).
Actually, maybe the mention feature in Echo (the notifications extension) should follow the redirects instead, so that this would work for users not using DiscussionTools as well?
Note it is not possible to create an account using an username that was in use previously. If user:Foo gets renamed to User:Bar, no one (but administrators) can register User:Foo. It was possible for a long time, and it is a relatively recent change, but it's not possible today.
Also note that renaming generates a log at the "client wiki" as well, you can see that by going to Special:Log/rename at any wiki. They can only be triggered at meta, but they are logged everywhere.
Following redirects, which are generally created during renames, seems like a good idea. To reduce unwanted consequences, maybe do that only if the account does NOT exist?
@Urbanecm, if you remember, can you please comment here if/when you run into this issue again.
(For the time being, we're going to move this to the backlog until we receive more reports of people running into this issue.)
As noted in T411358, other parts of the interface use usernames scraped from the wikitext, such as the "Latest comment" headings. If we were to follow redirects then these should be updated too.
Especially in case of the “Latest comment” headings, but partly also in case of the pings: if someone wants to have their new user name reflected, they should update existing signatures (e.g. via a bot). I’d find it quite confusing if DiscussionTools said the latest comment is by User:New_name, but (looking at the signatures) only User:Old_name has ever commented in the topic/on the page.
Pings are a bit different, as pinging the old name is a no-op (which is definitely not what the user wants), so it may make sense there to auto-fix the name, but I’m not sure even there if the auto-fix reduces confusion more than how much new confusion it causes.
Updating signatures is something I do from time to time but there are definitely some folk who frown on the practice. I'm pretty sure getting a bot to change your old signatures en masse would draw a lot of heat?
There are plenty of reasons why someone might want to change their username, and it really doesn't seem right that DiscussionTools has created this burden for users of having to personally hunt down and eliminate instances of their old one. (In my case, after 23 years on EnWP there must be piles of talk pages where I'm the last person to have signed, but there's no easy way of finding out what those are.) Especially because doing so will draw attention to the name they want to move away from. For example, I really don't want to alert a lot of random people to my deadname.
I’d definitely not oppose using a bot for this task, especially (but not only) if you have very good reasons like a deadname or privacy issues. Of course, I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d hope people would have understanding at least in cases with such good reasons.
There are plenty of reasons why someone might want to change their username, and it really doesn't seem right that DiscussionTools has created this burden for users of having to personally hunt down and eliminate instances of their old one.
I disagree that DiscussionTools would have created a burden. Those user names have always been there, visible in the topics. (Unless the old signature has nothing to do with the old user name – which is possible if someone got their user name changed to adopt a name by which they have become known anyway, but not very likely if the old user name is a deadname.) There used to be ideas to store only the user ID in the wikitext, and load the signature dynamically based on that, which could solve this issue (the user ID doesn’t change with a renaming), but as far as I remember, these ideas were dropped for performance reasons and/or because they would have made wikitext harder to read (I don’t remember which one or ones were the reason(s)).
(In my case, after 23 years on EnWP there must be piles of talk pages where I'm the last person to have signed, but there's no easy way of finding out what those are.)
I think one could write a bot that goes through all pages that link to your user page (or talk page, or whatever you used to use in your signature) and checks whether DiscussionTools thinks you’re the last user to comment on the page / in a thread on the page. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to only update some pages, though – if you refer in a comment to another comment you wrote minutes earlier, but the two comments are signed with different names, that either confuses people, or draws attention to you having been renamed. So I’d suggest either updating everything or updating nothing.
Especially because doing so will draw attention to the name they want to move away from. For example, I really don't want to alert a lot of random people to my deadname.
I think the discrepancy between the heading and the content would also draw more attention to the renaming than leaving old discussions show the old name – and the discrepancy would draw attention forever, as opposed to the updating in wikitext, which draws attention once and then fades away.
If you want to draw as little attention as possible, the best way to do it is to just leave old discussions as-is. Readers of the talk page may not be able to associate the old name with your new identity, but after all, that’s what you wanted.
I see what you're saying and broadly agree. However there's a nuance I should have mentioned in my comment before.
Changing signatures in old talk pages around the place would certainly be likely to draw attention and is probably best avoided. However, I encountered this issue in a subpage of my userspace. I think the prominent display of someone's former username at the top of any of their user talk: pages is much more problematic than the chance that someone reading through one (which itself is going to be an infrequent occurrence) is confused by a mismatch between the banner and the last edit to the page. Yes you can find and edit away all old signatures in that space, but that's the burden I was specifically referring to. It could also draw attention in the same way, but when someone has a particular reason to not wish an old name be highlighted on pages in their userspace, they may feel like they have no other choice.