[opensource-dev] O.O Display name code DROP!

[Dave Booth]

  On 10/15/2010 06:53, Stickman wrote:
> If it's not, the Lindens should be waking up soon and see a huge
> thread of people screaming that the sky is falling and put some
> authority down on the situation. Looking forward to it, those clouds
> are looking awfully close.

The sky may not be falling and its not a question of unreasoning panic 
or hyperbole, but the whole point of logs is to be able to go back to 
them after the fact and see who said what. I'd even grudgingly accept a 
format change provided theres more in there as an identifier than just a 
bare uuid - its GOT to have at a minimum both the real name and the 
display name they are using at the time. Without both those the utility 
of any kind of logging becomes questionable. Logs will still be of value 
to resolve disputes since they record the uuids of the participants 
(although that process becomes a LOT less straightforward since one has 
to look up the uuid to find any name) but what about situations where 
inworld activities are being logged for another purpose, like 
documenting RP story arcs? Somebody changes "roles" in the RP a few 
months down the line and switches their display name to match and 
suddenly all the logs of their previous character seem to refer to their 
current one since theres no contemporaneous logging of the display name.

Certainly one of the RP groups I spend time with is going to have a hard 
time, since theres a lot of stuff they use logs for - copying them over 
to group websites to provide records and narrative so that we keep 
decent continuity.

To provide a more silly example of why its a bad idea, to know that uuid 
00000000-0000-0000-0000-0000000000000 was yelling "Fear my sparkly 
colors!" just isnt funny if you cant remember that user Joe.Lame was 
using the display name of "Phils Codpiece" at the time......