Curious on a habit I am starting to see on the trilogy. There is nothing stated on this in the FAQ so figured I would ask here. What is the policy on using a web address as your display name? Personally to me this feels more like spamming since the profile gives you a field for a web address. Just curious what others think.
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While doing some flagging (yes, I'm a little bit addicted) I stumbled upon the user . At first the case seemed clear, Spammer, but...and that's a big one, he seems to be a productive member of SU and SO (his account on SF isn't there anymore, but it's still in the Data-Dump of the explorer, not sure what happened).  He does never seem to link against StarWind-Software, except with his name and profile. He also  that he's a developer there...so...at what am I looking here? I can't really place him somewhere.
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Is this a StackExchange site? It looks and seems to function the exact same, but seems to have its own user system, and doesn't contain links to all of the other SE sites at the bottom like all the ones I've seen do.  If this is not an "official" SE site is it acceptable for third party sites to "copy" the look &amp; feel of SE to this extent or is this site in violation of something?
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I noticed, when viewing a question on the , that my username and profile is not correct.  , and .  Something is weird here:   My profile "about" section is filled in and I have the Autobiographer badge. I certainly never manually filled in the about page there so clearly this account is connected to my main account as the profile text was filled in automatically. Yet, the username and avatar does not match. Also I have the association bonus there, so it definitely wasn't me logging in randomly, I must have been already logged in as myself network-wide when I created that account (assuming I created that account).  The "private information" section in that user900 profile is completely blank (no full name, no email address), unlike all of my other profiles. Only the "about me" is really filled in.   Points 1 + 2 = there's no reason why the username or avatar should be different.  Point 3 is a mystery.  Also I am quite sure it's connected to my account. When I log out of Literature it does log me out of the entire network. And when I log in to the network, that account on Literature shows up again.  What is going on here? Is this a bug? An accidental merge? Did I do something weird?   None of this makes any sense to me. There's no reason why I should have a profile with a generic username and gravatar on that site given the other observations.  Additional random data points:   I use the same Google login for everything here. Just to be sure I reviewed account activity for my Google account. There are no security alerts, no unrecognized devices, and no suspicious logins or other activity. I do not use the mobile apps. I sometimes use the mobile site through my phone, but I checked my phone's browser history (which I have not cleared since January) and confirmed that I have never visited that site there. Looks like I haven't cleared my desktop browser history either, and I can at least verify that I did indeed create the account on March 1st, there is a visit to the  and the first question I visited was , although it does not appear that I took any actions there. According to my browser history I edited my profile, or at least visited the edit page, on March 2 (via MSE) and March 4 (via SO). I would have applied the changes to all communities. According to  the Literature site profile was updated on March 3, two days after it was created. Not sure if this is a red herring, but these events did all happen around the same time. Yesterday, I had an unregistered account on the UX site merged with mine (long story), it seemed to happen without a hitch, not sure if that's related.
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I am interested in changing my display name to my full name, but am concerned about losing the connective tissue in the comment threads I participated in. Because @name links do not appear to be linked or coupled to an account, I want to avoid impairing the readability of a discussion.  If I were to change my display name, does the change, in turn, update @name user references for questions/answers/comments I participated in?
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I've just noticed, if somebody deletes one of his Stack Exchange accounts, his username is replaced. That's pretty nice, but comments aren't updated and still reveal the original username "@username message goes here". I think that should be updated, too.
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What is the reasoning behind the design decision to allow users to create a display name which matches another existing users exactly?    This is opposed to the common practice of enforcing unique user names, and I'd really like to learn something.
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to  reminded me of something I have been trying to work out how to do for a while.  At the moment I just have one SO/SX account with one OpenID and both work and personal accounts all linked together. This is easy and simple, but means that during the day I get Inbox notifications for things which I only want to deal with out of work hours. Similarly, at home I get notifications for things which I want to deal with at work.  So, I'm considering trying to separate my work and personal Stack Exchange worlds, but I'm not even sure if this is possible now the accounts are all linked, without creating all new SX accounts.  I suspect that at the very least I will have to create a new OpenID with a different OpenID provider, add this openID to all of my personal accounts, update my display names on all of those accounts and then remove the original OpenID from them, but what else might I have to do?  Will switching them to another OpenID be enough? Or will the accounts all still be linked together? Has anyone done this, and if so, are there any issues I need to consider?  Note, I'm aiming for the two sets of SX sites to be completely disjoint. No site in my professional account will also be in my personal account and vice-versa, so no problems with appearing to be a sock-puppet. Also, obviously, I don't want to have create entirely new accounts for the SX sites I consider personal and have to start acquiring rep on them from scratch.
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What is the format of  account names?  The information I have a use for is:   what characters are permitted or prohibited? what is the maximum length? are they always treated as case-insensitive?   However, a complete, exact definition of the allowed format would be appreciated.
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How I can remove myself from some Stack Exchange sites, but keep my profile? (For example, I subscribed to some sites just for curiosity; I just browsed without posting or replying.)  I found a delete option but I am afraid to click!   Would it be possible also to unsubscribe from sites where I have been active?
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I noticed that the reputation from the main site carried over to meta on Gaming (at least the first upvote), I guess that doesn't work the other way around, right?  Is it then impossible to have a meta reputation higher than the site reputation?
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What is done to prevent people from changing their display name to another persons', for example Jon Skeet, and then also changing their gravatar to match too?  In comments it seems there is no visible differentiator, and the differentiator in questions and answers is just reputation and badges.  This doesn't seem to be a problem for stackoverflow, but I'm just wondering what are possible safeguards against this?  EDIT: Also it doesn't even have to be deliberate, if two people just happen to choose the same display name, and they both participate in the same question/comment thread, that would be confusing right?
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After finding , I thought about inspecting Community's ♦ profiles. What did I notice? Community ♦ have more than 1 rep on some meta sites.    - 5 rep  - 3 rep  - 3 rep  - 3 rep   Why is it?
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When a user signs up , their username is something along the lines of "user########"  Granted, in the welcome email it does say something along the lines of "Head over to your user account page to chose a display name!", however only a few people actually read that email.  I'm not saying we should restrict people from changing their display name again in the future - Everyone would still be able to do so. It's just that when you sign up you choose an initial display name that will be what your first display name is instead of "user########".
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I was just asking a question on Gardening SE and suddenly my user name there is a25bedc5-3d09-41b8-82fb-ea6c353d75aand my picture is replaced by a Gravatar. My location is also left blank.  Here's a   Curiously, my profiles on all other sites are fine.  I don't have a separate login for SE, I log in using my Google account. Nobody other than me has access to my Google account. I use two step authentication and I can see on "recent devices" in Google that no one but me has accessed my Google account. I only access SE from home, and nobody other than me has used my devices.   I tried to edit my Gardening SE profile back to the way I want it to be and I got the following message:     Oops! There was a problem updating your profile:   Display name may only be changed once every 30 days; you may change again on Jun 20 at 10:49   I'm assuming this is because I changed the "about me" on all SE sites two days ago.  I never edit my profiles individually. I always apply changes to all sites, using the same profile on all sites.  I have certainly not made such strange (or any) edits to my profile on Gardening SE.  Why did this happen, and how can I get my proper user name and picture back on Gardening SE? Do I really have to wait for a whole month? I want to use the site, and I want them to recognize me as the user they know. I don't want to wait a whole month.  Update: The Gardening SE moderator Niall C. helped me out, and he offered the following potentially relevant information:     I changed your display name on Gardening &amp; Landscaping back to "Fiksdal". Your profile history shows that your profile image (from your headshot on imgur.com to a gravatar), email, about me also changed at the same time as your display name on May 21. It also shows that I changed your profile image to a different gravatar when I changed your display name just now... weird! – Niall C. 1 hour ago
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Is there a name for the default avatars that are generated for users who do not assign one themselves? Not the avatar of the blank user, but the one made up of shards, shapes, and colours:      Is there an online generator for something like that? See also:
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Is it legal republish any article with Credits and Canonical Link?  After the end of the post I will mention a note like Originally published at www.example.com/post.  Additionally I will add a canonical tag too that post.
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. . . or is it set up so that I must have at least one account per site to participate? And if the latter, is there an easy way to keep my profile information synced across all the sites that I am a member of?  I would prefer to have just one login, password, personal description, picture, etc. to remember and maintain.