Change your username and game name update

It's great to get out the gate this year with an update! If you've been following on the discord or on twitter then you might already be aware of this update. Although it seems a simple enough update to make, it actually wasn't and needed core elements of the site reworked to make possible. Which is my main reason for making an update post. Usually small updates don't need an entire post to talk about. In this case I think it is worth being aware of as I potentially could have broken some features (I always test these things but you'd be surprised to how easy it is to miss problems).

So up til now I have actually had a few people ask me about username changes or changing name of their games, which originally would have been extremely difficult before the rebuild. So originally on the first build, I didn't want to contact the database multiple times to bring back information about a user when showing the games for example. So I connected the users and the games by the username instead of a numeric identification. This allowed me to display the username as it was already in the game data as well as link the games and the users by the username too. So when changing the username the connection between these would be broken and breaking everything. Now I wasn't originally thinking about changing the username as there is another benefit to making this change. Basically the database can connect the games to the users far faster using a number then it can as text to identify a connection. So when I was making speed updates end of last year, this was something I was thinking about.

Although I wasn't in a hurry to get this done, recently on discord bow had suggested username changes. So I decided to make it happen. Then I also did the same for games as well. Which was even more difficult as that required folder structure changes for all the games and images but now it is possible to change the game name too! What the system will do is create a redirect for your old username or game name to take you to your game or profile still in case you still have links to your profile etc out there. The redirect will stay there until someone either registers your old username / creates a game with your old game name or you change your username / game name again.

So as you can see a lot had to be changed so if you do run into any problems, please let me know on discord!

Thanks,

-iDev