Gone are the days of being @PigFucker#4284, Discord is now letting you simply be @pigfucker with their new username system.
A new blogpost on the Discord website by the CTO and co-founder of the messaging service Stanislav Vishnevskiy has revealed the company’s plans to change their approach to the Discord username.
“Starting this month, however, we’re making some big changes to how usernames and identities work on our platform,” Vishnevskiy says in today’s post. “The whole point of these changes is that we want to make it a lot easier for you and all the new users coming to Discord to connect and hang out with friends.”
Vishnevskiy goes on to explain that when Discord started, their main priority was getting people onto a server quickly without having to worry about hitting “a screen that said ‘Your Desired Username is Taken.’”. Discord didn’t even have a friend system when it started either, so they were pretty lax when it came to usernames.
That being said, many users have found that the case-sensitive, 4-digit discriminator usernames that Discord is known for can be a little complicated when it comes to adding friends. According to the post, almost 50% of all friend requests fail to connect the user with the person they wanted to match with, so it seems like they’re wanting to head in a more user-friendly direction.
So what are the changes exactly? Well, it looks like Discord is taking a leaf out of Twitter’s book. Users will have “a unique alphanumeric username without a discriminator” and will be limited to “lowercase characters, numbers, and two special characters (period and underscore)”, so @pigfucker, for example.
Users will also have a “non-unique display name that can include just about anything”, with this name being “how you primarily appear and will be your most prominent form of identity”. So, for example, if your username is @pigfucker, your display name can be ‘I Don’t Actually Fuck Pigs (Or Do I?)’. Refer to the header picture.
When will the changes to Discord usernames be happening? The post has started that users will start to be notified as to when they’re able to update their accounts to a new username and display name “in the coming weeks”, and said notification will be delivered via in-app prompt.
Vishnevskiy continues by clarifying that the order of notifications, aka who will be getting to choose usernames first, will be based on when users made their Discord accounts. So if you made your Discord account in the early days of the service, you’ll probably be first up to choose a username. If you made your account yesterday, you’ll be waiting a little longer.
Leave a Reply