Indeed, I’m sorry I forgot about title edits. My proposal was inspired by GitHub’s URLs, which don’t need IDs at all…
I’m curious why you think usernames should be unique. SE doesn’t have a unique requirement, and uniqueness is not driven by technical necessity - I don’t see a good reason to impose that restriction on names. What’s your thinking here?
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uniqueness is not driven by technical necessity
OFC not. But we need an identifier. This may be an ID, but just as well an unique name. And usually names are better than IDs for people to remember. Allowing duplicate names can easily cause confusion and provides impostors with better possibilities. For pinging, unique names are also more useful.
I disagree …
And usually, names are better than IDs for people to remember.
I’d say natural names are better than IDs. Mandating uniqueness amongst names results in either contorting bits of a given name with bits of a surname (or perhaps their skillset with their location), or horrid multi-digit suffixes - appgurueu282694 - which end up being IDs anyway. Users will be known by their name, not their ID. Ids are for the computer.
Allowing duplicate names can easily cause confusion
We seem to have managed IRL for a few thousand years.
For pinging …
You ping the ‘user’, not a name, not an ID.
@ArtOfCode appgurueu’s comment does beg a question though. Outside of email, will there be a user-created, unique ‘codename’/handle that can (for example) pop up when you start typing an at-code name in your post, so you can select the correct one of two users with similar/the same name?
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The systems that handle this best in my opinion are the gaming based systems. Not sure who started it but basically everyone has their freely chosen display name and everyone has additionally a number which is also always shown (or max 1 click away).
A bunch of systems use it, I first noticed it on Battle.Net years back. Discord has the same nowadays.
This allows easy identification and linking, pinging or whatever for John Smiths.
If at any point we run out of space for John Smiths we’d either go alphanumerical (e.g airline booking code alphabet) or append a number.