patrick.net

Some people have asked for a way to track whether someone has changed his user name on patrick.net.

You can already figure out if someone is the same person by watching his user_id, which is a unique identifier that cannot be changed. For example, if you look at https://patrick.net/user/Patrick and mouse over or click on "Has 50 followers" you'll see that my user_id is 1, because I was the first person to register. Even if I were to change my user name, my user_id will always be 1 for that account. To get a new user_id, I'd have to register again with a different email address.

But tracking user_id is a bit of work.

I suppose I could create a new table in the database for previous user names, but then that's work for me, and adds complexity to the code.