changing user name

They just implemented a brand new system in April of this year, why would they do another major revision?

I suspect that the user alias is an indexed key to the entire system which is why changing the alias is not a trivial task, and since the system is also tied to an Apple ID the problem is expanded geometrically.

I'm not naive by any stretch but you can't throw money at everything to fix it. Jive not only has the software but at one time it was believed the system ran on their hardware and may still. There's not a lot to go with for a system of this size and if it came to Apple trying to develop something themselves I'm sure they would shut it down.

And I'm not even going to get into people constantly changing their alias, etc.

deggie: If these forums were Jive before the April changes and are Jive now, then they did not "implemented a brand new system" but rather they just gave the subpar forum system a facelift.

These forums were subpar to Apple quality standars then, and are subpar to Apple quality standars now. If you ask me what I consider Apple quality standars for a support community, check StackOverflow forums.

Also, some Apple Support Communities username changes have been honored by Apple Staff from time to time, so it must be not that difficult to provide this feature.

Again: the Apple Support Communities username is hard-coded to your Apple ID the first time you login, with no warning wahtsoever. In my humble opinion, that is not very much user-friendly, so an online form for users to request one (and no more than one) Apple Support Communities user name change would be an appropriate solution.

When you signed up in 2007 you were not given the opportunity to create an alias? I find that hard to believe given the number of people who have joined since that have there own alias. Apple assigned xdcdx to you?

In the link that you provided Tuttle did a better job than I did as to the difficulty factor. Not sure why you were linking it.

You don't have to move to a new company to have new software or a new system.

How many million participants does StackOverflow have? Size matters.

Yes on an extremely limited basis Apple has made the change for longtime users (only two that I know of) with one of those a request for security reasons. That does not mean it is easy.

> When you signed up in 2007 you were not given the opportunity to create an alias? I find that hard to believe given the number of people who have joined since that have there own alias. Apple assigned xdcdx to you?

Yes, back on 2007 I chose xdcdx.

Forward to 2011: I change the email address of my Apple ID to my current email address.

I login to Apple Support Communities (which I had not logged in to since 2007) and to my surprise I see this nickname that I almost didn't remember using here.

For me, it's irrational that I am able to change the main email address of my Apple ID (is there any piece of information more important than that?), but not this little username on this subpar forum system (subpar because of the web design/engineering, I don't mean to offend all the people here which are always quite helpful).

I upgrade to iCloud, and my email address gets hardcoded to my Apple ID. That's good, because I want this email address. In that case, they make sure to warn you that you had to chose an email address as an Apple ID for iCloud. That was not the case in this forums.

> In the link that you provided Tuttle did a better job than I did as to the difficulty factor. Not sure why you were linking it.

>

> You don't have to move to a new company to have new software or a new system.

>

> How many million participants does StackOverflow have? Size matters.

How many million participants have these forums?

At least you do not seem to disagree with me that these forum are subpar compared to the usual Apple perfectionism level (see iCloud nice web user interface, for another fine example). This thing still looks like a forum from 2007.

> Yes on an extremely limited basis Apple has made the change for longtime users (only two that I know of) with one of those a request for security reasons. That does not mean it is easy.

I still am not convinced that it is technically that difficult. I think it just a policy on part of Apple to avoid banal username change requests.

In part, I am not more active in this forums because I do not want my words to be associated to this nickname, becayse it is used on internet by tons of other people for other stuff, as a Google result will show.

Anyway, thanks for your words. I'll keep looking from time to time for the username change feature, because I do want to contribute to these forums.