Oops, I posted this in the Activity stream by mistake the first time

WHY are administrators prevented from changing someone’s Username? I suspect this is a WP restriction more than BP but, as I think about it, I can’t think of any real reason why such a restriction exists. Internal DB linkage between the user and his/her posts, etc are associated with the UID not the Username. Could it be that the check for a duplicate Username occurs only at the point of initial registration?

I’m just trying to think this through before I give it a try by making changes directly in the database.

So, WHY might one want to do this? I have a large number of people whom I’m adding to my blog and it’d be much easier for me to simply enter all of their information FIRST using a standard Username convention then allow them to change the username or request that the administrator make such a change.

[@boonebgorges Keymaster 14 years, 2 months ago]

Many URLs in BP (and even WP) are generated with the username. Those URLs are then used to create links in, eg, activity items, which are then stored as plaintext in the database. In other words, many of those links will break if you change the username.

[@dwdutch Participant 14 years, 1 month ago]

Ewwww! Point well taken! Thanks, @boonebgorges

I guess a good solution would be to find a plug-in that lets you “replicate/migrate” an existing user’s xprofile contents to a a new user then you can delete the original user.

Fortunately, I’ve only had to deal with this situation one time and, although i thought it might be more problematic, it hasn’t so far.

[@nahummadrid Participant 13 years, 11 months ago]

I’ve done this a few times disregarding the old broken link activity items. not a super big deal when there’s not a lot of activity yet attributed to a user.

As I was working with another case just today, i notice that the user avatar in the old activity items ends up with the right link where the username doesn’t? Is this something that could possibly be related so that in the future a fix might be that when/if a username is changed in the DB the username link will fix itself just like the avatar currently works.

[@ewebber Participant 13 years, 5 months ago]

I know this is an old thread, but I’ve been using this plugin http://buddydev.com/buddypress/allow-your-users-to-change-their-username-on-your-buddypress-based-site/ – of course the old activity items won’t update