Previous Usernames No Longer Show On Profiles

Is there a reason why the ability for users to see previous usernames in user profiles will be re-enabled in December?

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This is a bad idea, and shouldn’t be permanently removed off the searching tab.

This will encourage scamming, people can now change their usernames to avoid getting called out for something bad they did.

People on the consoles, Desktop app & mobile app are unable to find people’s userIDs and save them, if they need to report a user for scamming them or breaking the rules in other ways.

This is a very bad choice, and they should not be permanently removed.

I understand this is a good “privacy” option, however I think it should only affect the profile page, not the searching tab. I would also think, it would be nice to allow people to turn this on/off in case people want to show their old usernames.

Imagine this scenario: Little timmy gets scammed by “NoobyBoy716”, they change username to something different, now little timmy has no way of finding out who the scammer was and how they can tell their friends to prevent getting scammed. He can also not report him because they can’t find him.

Only users on desktop devices wil be able to save people’s accounts in case they need to ban them, or report them for scamming, or beaking the roblox ToS because they can grab the userid from the url.

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This is honestly quite unnecessary, I really don’t understand why this change was made. Quite useless tbqh

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They can’t.

We already have UserId’s for Roblox to moderate stuff like this. Also I think this is a much worse problem than people who got outright doxxed. Especially considering it costs them 1000 robux every time they want to do this.

The staff member said you’d still be able to search by previous usernames, just not view them on search.

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I don’t entirely think this is a realistic scenario.
For one thing, I heavily doubt a scammer would be willing to spend 12 bucks just to change their username to avoid being banned. For another, this already is more or less possible if the scammer were to just create a new alt account after every scam. Timmy could get the account banned, sure, but it wouldn’t do anything if it’s no longer in use.

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Also, a better report feature that allows you to report players who left a game would be much more ideal for this scenario and allow this update to happen.

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To be fair 1000 robux is a very minimal amount in today’s economy and I believe many bad actors would not hesitate to spend that cost if it meant avoiding the actions of moderation.

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This is the only mainstream platform that links previous usernames to an account. This can be said for millions of other similar games, and does happen. But I feel like the scenarios that have actually happened are a much bigger problem compared to scammers. You can do the same thing in certain Minecraft servers etc.

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It’s not just scammers that I’m worried about. I was talking about scammed so I won’t have to mention the more messed up stuff, but there’s also a lot of people who are using the roblox platform for illegal things, messed up things which I assume you could figure out what I mean. There’s a lot of those who care about their Roblox accounts and change their usernames alot. It’s going to be harder to identify such people and report them to Roblox now.

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Wouldn’t they just use alts? There are people that join these types of games and report people in it and I’m sure that type of community would know that.

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Not sure, probably you just find one in a random game acting inappropriately or something, and they just happen to change their name soon after that. I heard of cases where people were discovered to be weirdos because of their usernames history, having inappropriate usernames in there.

There’s cases where usernames history would be needed.

By reading the post I understand that in december, Roblox will only censor names that look like real names in your history? I hope that’s the case

And hopefully names api still returns all usernames

If you’re re-adding the ability to view past usernames then please try to look into a possible way of letting us hide our past usernames. If moderation is that big of an issue, you could always just make it so that a past username must have been changed x months ago before it can be hidden, or that the user must be phone-verified, etc.

I was so excited when I first saw this, until I realized that this is only temporary, and that past usernames are coming back in December. I have so many reasons why I want to hide my past usernames.

The “Hide Past Usernames On Profile” feature request thread was created over 5 years ago and has over 500 likes, with plenty of people giving their support and reasons behind wanting it.

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Instead of re-enabling the previous usernames visibility could you alteast add an option to hide old usernames? I’d rather not have someone be able to see that I used to go by MasterMcGamerYT when I was 9 years old.

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idelww, would this be a possible solution aswell? If someone cared enough about reporting they would do it asap and they only really need a month minimum. More time can be possible in case it’s a repeat offender, but this seems like it’d be good.

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Yeah, that would also be a great thing, allowing people to hide usernames but the last month’s usernames would also be a good thing, keeping the privacy while also temporarily preventing some issues.

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This doesn’t work for the people who WANT their past usernames hidden. Roblox should not have given this false hope of removing a feature that’s gonna be replaced either way. What’s the point of removing it from being searched but not on their profile?

There needs to be options for us players considering we carry this platform and make a huge difference, we should have a say in this as well. We should have the option to hide our past usernames regardless. Please consider this post and think wisely!!

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As someone who was in the replies of the “Hide Past Usernames On Profile” feature request mentioned a couple times in the thread, I can tell y’all, I feel safer with my past usernames hidden. It’s such a small thing that honestly goes a long way.

As xyrafrost proposed, this would be such a great solution to so many problems that there might’ve been with the idea of “hiding names” in the first place.

I also agree with Lunar’s point; If you can still search the old username and it’ll pop up with a result as mentioned by the staff member, what REALLY is the point of hiding said old name if it’ll still show up as both a search result, and on the users profile? I’m genuinely kinda lost on it.

I still do hope Roblox introduces a Hide Username feature at some point outside of this though. The current change just doesn’t seem like much that’ll help in the long run, unless there’s more to it that we just don’t know yet.

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Why not have an option for it?

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This is long overdue. Happy to see that something is changing.

They changed basically nothing imo. Did you read the whole post? (not being rude or passive aggressive, genuine question. I see how it sounds with that question mark there) You’ll still be able to view them in the future. We just cannot see them for now.