As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to hide your past usernames on your profile. I feel as a user of Roblox that this should be a privacy feature embedded into the platform itself and would allow users to feel safe online with their current username representing their avatar entirely.
This feature wouldn’t improve development necessary but help secure and maintain the safety on Roblox for users who may have accidentally used their real name in the past or names they wish to no longer use. I have uses for both of those.
Here is a lounge thread of other developers who shared their excitement and support for this feature. I believe this would be a nice step forward to securing identity on Roblox. https://devforum.roblox.com/t/hide-past-usernames/231853
I’m aware this is a pretty old suggestion but honestly the only way you’ll really be able to hide the username is by purchasing so many name changes that they go off of the page. A few of my friends have somewhat around 150+ usernames attached to their account.
I think if it was more refined it’d be more acceptable.
Instead of just having a “show/don’t show past usernames” switch or a “remove all past usernames” button, we could choose between which usernames we want to show/hide/delete. Doing so would allow users to change their alias with relative ease while being known for the previous one(s), as well as being able to remove embarrassing older ones that they don’t want to associate with anymore.
Overall, I support this, it just needs to be pulled off the right way.
Going to bump this; Support! I’m not a typical user who changes usernames but I have friends or colleagues who do and have a lot of usernames being changed often, they could and want to hide their past usernames on their profile.
Anyway, I do think that this is nice to add and implement it into the website so many users who change their usernames often and want to not reveal it to anyone but as what HeadlessHorror said about it, the only way to bypass it has to be having thousands and thousands of R$ of names down a huge row. I don’t know why this was added in the first place when username changing was a thing as some might have concerns for it.
Some settings idea that I had were:
Who can view your past usernames?
Past usernames: On/Off
^ Same thing as above.
Show past usernames: Disable/Enabled
Overall, I do like this being added but there could be at least a flaw into this if it was added and could have an impact on users, we’ll see how it goes.
I think this feature request needs a little bit more light. Okay, my past username is well, uh, you can check it out you self… Long story short, I made the username when I was pretty young and I was trying to spell Vegeta from DBZ and it didn’t go well. As a professional developer who aims to make a career of Roblox, branding is very important to me.
I don’t want that in my past username section, and it honestly surprises me that there is no feature to hide the name you tried to get rid of…
Surprising that this has 51K views and is from 2019, and yet this STILL hasn’t been added.
I think this should be added because there is not real reason NOT to add it. Not a single website does this other than ROBLOX because there is no POINT TO! With the addition of display names it doesn’t help all that much.
If you have an embarrassing user you don’t like you either have to live with it or make a new account, and if you’re account is really old I doubt you’d want to do that.
It really should be added. There are a lots of kids on this platform who put their name or birth year in their usernames, and as they get older they probably change them. With the past usernames feature, it’s hard to hide your own personal info, which is a huge security issue for the user.
If you have your personal info in your username you should be contacting Roblox support to have it removed by them, they will then direct you to getting your username changed without costing any Robux and it will no longer appear as a past username.
As for the OP’s feature-request, I am against this feature being implemented. In it’s current implementation, once a username is used it can never be used again, even if someone changes their username. This means if previous usernames were made private, you wouldn’t know who’s blocking you from creating an account with x username. You cannot simply just make these usernames available either as a player may unknowingly pick a username with a lot of negative attention and some people will attempt to sell usernames via this method. It’s a disaster waiting to happen!
Also, what about people who join a game, do something against ToS then leave and change their username, what happens to these people, they can’t be reported since you can no longer search by their previous username?
There’s simply too many edge-cases and the inconvenient (yet much more secure solution) of ‘contact support’ works for most cases of having PII in a username.
You risk the fact that you could get banned for having personal info in your name. The TOS strictly states that giving personal info is not allowed, and people have gotten their account terminated per username change requests before.
I mean they could just remove this, but understandably it’s probably not as simple as that thus this is probably the main reason they wont do this feature.
I feel like you should be able to search by their past names still, but have the ability to hide your past usernames. Although then what is really the point of hiding your usernames? Maybe if they really wanted to they could make it a Premium feature? no clue.
There are a lot of bad offsides but if these could somehow be negated or at least put to a minimum it would be nice to hide your past usernames. I’m all for this feature if they can iron out those details.
Afaik Roblox have rarely done this and I have only ever heard of positive messages from friends who followed through with the process.
That’s exactly what I’m getting at, also it could create more confusion, having a ‘hide previous usernames’ option could make some users believe it is also blocked in search, you can’t win, you sacrifice UX no-matter what.
This already happens with deactivated/terminated accounts. And what’s the point in telling you exactly who managed to claim your desired name? If the username is already taken, there’s nothing you can do.
It costs 1000 Robux to change your username. I don’t think this would happen very often; they’d just use an alt. Even then, user IDs still don’t change (aka what’s actually in the profile URL), and is it even possible to report someone after they’ve already left a game?
I really wish I could hide my past usernames. They don’t represent me and nothing can come out of leaving them public except potential harassment.
Steam allows you to clear name history, and Minecraft removed their username history API in 2022. I don’t see why this shouldn’t be a feature. Roblox is the only large platform I can think of that does this.
Yeah they really should just scrap the previous usernames feature.
It’s completely outdated and prevents others from using usernames permanently (which is ridiculous). It also doesn’t respect the users right to anonymity. Not having this on profiles would likely improve the user experience too.
Originally a common practice was to use usernames to save data in places instead of userid, which obviously is not good practice. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roblox took this into account when making the decision to allow users to own usernames permanently.
Username changing should be free. You know like every other platform.
You shouldn’t be stuck with an identifier you no longer associate with.
Usernames shouldn’t be unnecessarily taken up by one user purchasing them.
What exactly seeing someone’s past bypassed usernames contributed to your Roblox experience? At this point, isn’t it Roblox’s fault on not having a proper bypassed username check in this place?
There has been some cases when someone’s past username was wiped off from roblox through roblox support, but i really think they should just add a setting for it nonetheless.
Isn’t hiding those usernames better rather than still showing it off? Mistakes can be done, hiding would not only solve that problem but also actually respect people’s privacy.