Why does my old username still appear in a URL?
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I made a blog and I’ve decided to go by the pseudonym of “Winston”. Yet when I click the author link (Winston) in a post, I get directed to the author page, that’s fine. But when you highlight over the username “Winston” in the author page with your mouse, you can see in the URL below (the one that appears in the browser footer when you hover over a link, I’m using the Chrome browser in this case) you can see the following link (my blog in this case) “elwinston.wordpress.com/author/OBEDWARD”. OBEDWARD, was my old username for WordPress.com, which I changed to a new one. I don’t know if the team knows about this but that defeats the purpose of having a pseudonym or going anonymous while blogging if someone can identify you in a not-very-hard-to-find URL (which is potentially dangerous for some people, like say, in Cuba). Any help or thoughts about this? Thanks.
Blog url: http://elwinston.wordpress.com/ -
In this case, the posts were published under your old username, so they’re still assigned to that. All future posts will appear under your new username.
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Interesting, that’s definitely not expected behavior.
Just to be absolutely sure, does a second post result in the same problem?
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Sorry for the confusion. Changing the display name, or pseudonym, on an account does not change what appears in the author URL&emdash;it only changes what appears in on blog itself such as in the byline on posts.
To change the username in the URL, you would need to change your username itself to something different. See http://en.support.wordpress.com/change-your-username/#change-username for details.
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Thank you for replying, but I have already done this. As you can see in my forum posts my username is now “obedb”, when the last one was “obedward”. It kind of bugs me that the username is generally always visible to the public eye. This also brings up a matter of security. Since if someone wants to illegally access your account, they will already be one step ahead by knowing your username.
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This is rather odd, and we’ll look into it.
I wouldn’t worry so much about your username. Many services make this publicly available, not in the least Twitter where your username is your identity. The real security lies in your password.
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Okay, I see now. I have just tested the name change tool a few times and I found that changing the username with that tool always resulted in the author URL changing to reflect the new username. I also reviewed your account history and I saw that you changed over to obedb a few months ago, so I think your author URL should be updated. I also tried removing obedb from the blog and adding it back, but I don’t think it made a difference. I will see what else I can find out for you about that.
Regarding your other comments, on WordPress.com the username is going to be visible in the author URL and in the forums, so you should pick a name you don’t mind using in those areas and changing the username with the name change tool *should* update the author URL even though that is not working in your case for some reason. With regard to security, the best advice we can give you is to make sure you are using a secure password.
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Hey again, the author URLs at http://elwinston.wordpress.com/ should be fixed now. We also looked at the name change tool code and we think this should be working properly for other users already. Thanks for your note!
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