The popular online chat service has announced that it will be asking everyone to make the changes.
“Over the coming weeks,” all Discord usernames will need to be changed, according to an official announcement from the company behind the popular online chat service.
The platform allows people to form and join groups based on various different kinds of interest.
There are currently an estimated 150 million active users on the platform worldwide. They will all need to change their Discord usernames in the coming weeks. This will allow the platform to use a new system for the identification of its users.
Currently, users are identified by a hash symbol followed by four numbers. The new system will use identification that is much more familiar to users of other platforms, particularly on social media. The new system will start with an @ symbol, followed by a unique user name, similar to those seen on Instagram, Twitter, Slack, and many other chat and social platforms.
The Discord usernames are being changed in a step meant to make it easier for people to use.
According to the announcement made in an official company blog, the changes are being made “to make it easier for users to connect with their friends and to give users more control over their identity.”
The age of the accounts will determine the order in which people will be choosing their new Discord usernames. The oldest accounts will be provided with the first opportunity to choose their new names, so they will have the most options before names are taken.
The identifications are required to be alphanumeric, but they can use underscores and periods. Unlike Twitter though, no capital letters are permitted.
The platform was first launched in 2015 and is most popular among gamers. That said, it is also broadly used for interest groups and to arrange group activities. The reason is that users are able to divide the chat conversations into “channels” that are easily searchable.
Platform users are able to join servers (groups) without any member limit. Tremendously popular games such as Valorant and Genshin Impact each have public servers with over a million members.
