Name Change: Is nothing supposed to follow me?

Support Website Bug Report
1

I got a name change a couple days back (I was Jouta as some of you may know) but I noticed right now after logging out and back in that changing my name seems to have caused my character to be cut off from the posts I made on him. Which bothers me a bit because I still would like to be able to keep track of responses to my posts. Is this normal and I can expect my old posts to eventually catch up to the chance or am I actually forced to start fresh with a new name?

2

The Discourse forum engine doesn’t know that characters are related to each other, or that a character is the same character if you change its name. If you change name or realm, you’re a new forum member as far as the basic engine knows.

Discourse works better for other Blizzard games because you don’t have distinct characters, you just have your account. (Your “character” is what you choose in the game lobby, like in HoTS or Overwatch, or your deck of cards in Hearthstone.)

They really ought to better advertise this side effect of game services.

3

Ouch, rip in pieces, me. If I’d known this, maybe i’d at least get my name changed sooner before I started throwing myself everywhere. Looks like I’ll have to painstakingly try to find all the topics I had been following again.

I wonder if there’s any way staff could transfer my info back over?

4

Just as an experiment, you can try placing your old name in this link:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/u/xxxxxxx-moon-guard/activity

Hopefully that will bring up the old char’s post history that you can bookmark. It’ll have to be the exact spelling including any eASCII characters.

5

That worked. Thank you!

6

Awesome! Thanks for following up about it working. :slight_smile:

7

I’ve been told that if you create a new character with the same name and realm, it will inherit your old character forum info.

Never actually tried it myself though.

8

If that’s the case, I sure hope the same doesn’t apply if by some chance someone else uses the name.

9

No, it appears to be tied to the account the name was originally on.

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