They say name changes aren't allowed... Ah, I have an idea!

As the forums seem to suggest, the general idea I've gotten lately is that many residents' view of Linden Labs is that they just want to make more money. Well then, seeing as there are some residents who would liek to get their name changed, let me put forth the wonderful idea of being able to buy a new name.

Yes, LL makes more money, we get our name change, everyone is happy.

Now how much would a new name cost? L$500? L$10,000? Who knows...

Would there be any prerequisites? Account must be at least one year old? Who knows...

I want inputs, thoughts, tell me what you think! Improve my idea! Tell me it won't work! Input!

Name change for the heck of it: L$500

Name change for marriage (wife's to husband's, or vice versa) L$100

Keeping your name because it's become part of your pixelated identity: priceless

With all the inventory and account issues people have been having lately, I don't think I would even risk having my name changed for any amount of money. Besides I don't think LL even has the man power to really offer something like that. They certainly don't for other issues.

I guess... I dunno... perhaps they could make it difficult do to? As in expensive, other prerequisites (like the account must be older than a year thing), and maybe set up a long form to fill out so they can weed out a lot of people, and only the people who really want it will get it?

I'm sure Linden Labs would have no trouble making something difficult to do...

With possible federal Probes into gambling this may be a good idea. Changing the names of witness, A Second Life Witness Protection Program.

I don't think they're fans of 'difficult' so much as they are of 'frustrating' and 'impossible'.

Which means the current "you can't change your name" the ideal scenario.

(Disclaimer: I'm not typically anti-LL, basher type. Just a rainy blah SL-deprived day)

LOL People would open casinos to get name changes and parcel moves from mature to PG to circumvent the PG/Mature search issues.

LOL if they allowed name changes it would be more like USD10 or USD500. Not L$10. It would have to cost some serious amount of money to prevent people from flipping back and forth to commit fraud of some kind. Besides, I'm sure the DB changes required would be fairly extensive.

An alt account costs $10 US. An alt just to have a different name is a lot more database intensive than a simple name change. They could charge $5 US, make some money and reduce asset server loads.

Name changes are a damn easy thing to do in a database though, so it wouldn't require any staff at all to operate as a service.
Assuming they have the surnames stored in seperate table and referenced by ID (which might justify the cost for custom surnames), at the most complex, it's a case of something like:
where xxxx is the users ID.

Allow the users to chose from a dropdown box as they do on signups, and it's simply:
where yyyy is the chosen ID from the dropdown (after some verification of course).

If surnames are not stored in any external table:


Either way, it's a single line of SQL, it would hardly tax anyone to implement it.
If you want to make sure people aren't changing names too often, throw in a timestamp for last name change. Even then it shouldn't get beyond 2 queries.

If they have their DB planned properly, the changing of a surname will automatically update the name shown on land ownership, object ownership, profiles, tags above the AVs head and anything else.

The question that begs for an answer for me is, why would you want to change your name?

In some cases to make up for a stunning lack of creativity.

LL won't do namechanges as it is too valuable a system for marketers of RL stuff now coming in world. Sirnames were added over time, one expiring before another was added. Knowing how long a potential customer has been in world when they encounter an ad or buy a product with a real life counterpart, is important to the creation of proper demographics for the RL companies that seek to use SL as a marketing tool. The name means nothing, but the value lies in the timing and what it tells the marketers.

I seem to recall an announcement somewhere that LL will do surname changes for $150 US. Not sure if they still do that, but I remember there was something about that after the Suicide Girls drama last fall.

why would someone want to change thier name?




































i have no idea

Bingo.

No it isn't.

There are folders and files that have been named based on the name of the user. Those would have to be renamed, and renamed properly, and for that to happen you'd probably have to shutdown SL because of read/write permissions on those folders/files.

So strange. I just read this article today



Second Life' to charge for names By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer
Wed Apr 4, 10:13 AM ET



The online fantasy world "Second Life" will soon introduce the virtual equivalent of vanity plates, allowing residents to customize their characters' first and last names.

"Second Life" spokesman Alex Yenni said the feature, likely to cost $100 up front and $50 a year, would debut by the end of the year.

Currently, participants in the popular alternative universe can give their digital proxies — called avatars — nearly any first name they'd like.

But nearly everyone has to select from a rotating stock of surnames — conventional surnames such as Geiger, Felix and Lancaster, or futuristic, foreign or odd ones like Cioc, Stenvaag and Pugilist.

The 3-D fantasy world's operators, San Francisco-based startup Linden Research Inc., have approved special names to only a select group of high-profile members, including IBM Corp. Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano and Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards. So far the company hasn't charged for them.

The company's business development team decided to create a vanity name feature in part to help legitimize the growing number of executives, political candidates and other famous people who stage rallies and give stump speeches in the virtual world.

With the new feature, Linden Research will try to verify that avatars with high-profile names belong to same-named owners. For now, it's nearly impossible to determine the offline identity behind any avatar.

There are already "Second Life" avatars named John McCain (news, bio, voting record), Hillary Clinton, and Wesley Clark, but Yenni could not say whether those avatars were controlled by the presidential hopefuls, members of their staffs or random poachers.

As of Wednesday, no one in "Second Life" was named Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record), Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney.

*moves to feature suggestions*

LL in the past has sold custom last names, think they went for 1000$US per year.

I can confirm that there definitely are avatars with custom unique surnames flying around. I don't know how much the name costs though, as I wasn't working on that part of it.

You do know what SQL is right?
Presumably you are referring to the names of folders and files on your hard drive that the client has put there. These are nothing to do with SQL or changing of names.

SQL is the Structured Query Language used in databases, and the databases are run on the servers, not the client machines. In any well thought out implementation of a database, a single SQL query is all that is needed to perform a name change.

The fact that you may have to restart your SL client is nothing to do with why LL charge for custom names, and would have no effect on the grid whatsoever.

The SQL examples above are both a single query, and they work in MySQL (which LL use), so YES it is a single query. If it takes more than 2 queries then LL has some serious issues to work through with their database.

I'm not trying to be a Linden Labs basher, they've only ever been helpful to me... Just figured I would mention that.

Unfortunately, I am not knowledgable enough to give any input on the technical aspects of this idea. However, I can attempt to modify and polish the idea until it turns into something that may actually be feasable...

As for the pointed out problem of people changing names too often, there could be a limit to the number of name changes allowed. Maybe once per year, once per month... maybe only once ever.

Hey, we complain a lot about how premium accounts aren't what they used to be, how about making this a "premium account only" deal?

...I really don't see much to say that this is an idea that would be detrimental to the world of Secondlife. I'm not saying it's terribly beneficial, either, but it would be nice to change even just the first name of one's account.

As for why I want to change my name... I just don't like it. It's hard to pronounce (I use french rules of pronunciation), and indeed the name is a misspelling of the french word "charmante". Even so, people insist on confusing my name with that of a certain pokemon. I just want a name I like more than my current one! That's a good reason, no?

EDIT: And whoops, sorry for posting this in the wrong forum!

I'm a DBA/Database App developer and one thing we always have to keep in mind is keeping a history. If you changed your name you had better believe that LL would want to keep track of your 'previous' names and unless they are going limit you to a small number of changes they would probably need several tables to keep track of the history, adding to the foot print of the database. Is this incredibly hard? no. Is it as trivial to keep this history (in MySQL), a little. Again, not saying it is impossible, but there are going to be other ramifications to such a proposition that I'm sure we haven't thought of.

Also, if they are using MySQL (and I am not doubting you), that explains some of DB issues they are having.

I agree with you on the load issue, one way to do it would be to A) give you a set number of times you can name change, B) charge more each time, and/or C) throttle the rate at which you can name change to for example once every 6 months or once every year to prevent abuse. If throttled correctly I think they could mitigate the server strain since it would (in theory at least) be finding the spot for that person in the table and writing a new cell and then leaving it unless they want to repeatedly read the db as it would eventually grow huge.

Yes, these three suggestions are along the lines of what I have in mind, and probably what makes the most sense. There would definitely have to be restrictions placed on this, I mean it obviously wouldn't be as simple as changing the name of an object in your inventory...

I guess what we need is a Linden coder to clarify the uncertainies we have encountered (it seems there is a bit of a contention on how the exact code implementation would work, which makes sense, seeing as I don't think we have the actual database code to analyze). Though, good luck getting a Linden to comment on this issue-that-isn't-exactly-the-most-pressing-issue-around... >.>

I'm not a DBA, just a long term user of mysql in conjunction with php, so feel free to correct anything that looks wrong.
I agree that over-use of mysql could be a major part of the issues SL is experiencing lately. A site I worked on recently was having serious issues at 5,000 users online concurrently (A small athlon 64 3500+ server). By moving a lot of calls to the database that were used to check various timestamps and using a file based system, the overall system load was reduced to 1/10th of the original value. Knowing when not to use the DB can be as useful as any amount of indexing and my.cnf tweaks.

The thing with a name history is that it is part of the account data, so could be stored with the rest of the data. A seperated list can work very well when reading the data is more common than searching the data. Whether access is restricted to Lindens, or there is a "previously known as" field in profiles, it eliminates joins and searches across multiple tables/DBs, and the need for an ever expanding table to store the histories.
Using a list seperated by \n saves on computation elsewhere as the list can simply be displayed without parsing, this would work well when displaying in profiles.

Searching on such a field is a little more intensive, requiring a LIKE match rather than a straight comparison, but then a LIKE style match is used when you search your inventory and other things. This will be in much lesser use than inventory searches. If users are allowed to search for old names, then a simple tick box to specifically switch on old name searches would mean a lot less searches (just like the mature box).

If we assume however that the names will be stored in another table for speed of searching, it still should not be more than 2 queries. Query one to insert into the history table, query two to update the users table. With the addition of triggers in MySQL5, it could still remain as one query with a cached trigger performing the second (which would possibly be more efficient).

For limiting the number of changes a user can make, a timestamp of last name change in the users table would suffice and would still be updatable in the first query.

The amount of load this would cause in relation to some of the things being put on the site (friends list for example) is tiny, so there's no reason it can't be done because of load.

I am in agreement that it should be limited in usage, maybe one change per month or less, but that's mainly for anti griefer/conman reasons.