What is the abuse? Changing your meaningless identifier?
Despite your explanation, I still don't see any actual damage. I made up the identifier in the first place. Why should anyone care if I change it? All my posts will remain my posts.
The only thing is that maybe some people who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers? I would have thought they would have problems with people creating multiple new accounts and spamming, not changing the username of existing accounts.
> who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers?
Yes, because people will abuse it. If you keep track of violations (especially in moderated forums) it's important to know who did what. And while your primary key on the DB might still be the same, people don't know it, they know your nickname.
Some people would change it every time they comment just for the sake of it
New account creations have some kind of gatekeeping/email verification so it's not as efficient, and admins have ways of checking if this was done with the purpose of evading a ban for example
But if you want to change it because you made a typo or for a similar reason admins usually let you do it (they have to change it for you though)
Despite your explanation, I still don't see any actual damage. I made up the identifier in the first place. Why should anyone care if I change it? All my posts will remain my posts.
The only thing is that maybe some people who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers? I would have thought they would have problems with people creating multiple new accounts and spamming, not changing the username of existing accounts.
Please explain, I'm honestly curious. Maybe I'm missing something?