When you edit your profile, you can change your name
It’s a feature of OGS, just have to wait 1 month to do it again.
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I agree there could be an issue with impersonating others, though in this specific example I don’t think anyone on the site will confuse them with the original Mittens. Maybe if the user hasn’t logged in for at least five years, and never acquired a definite rank, it would be okay? That way established users would never have their names given away, but we also wouldn’t have people who only played one or two games several years ago hogging user names.
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I know about it.
I think that it is necessary to create a policy for this. Not the policy for requesting. But the policy for deletion inactive accounts. Actually such a policy already exists and is published in the TOS. The problem is that the period of inactivity is not strictly defined. How much is extended period? A day? Month? Year? Ten years?
Thinking that taking a name once makes you the owner forever on OGS even if you don’t use it is what is wrong.
It’s still much better as a place where they will free your name if you don’t show after 6 months.
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For me 6 months is too short period. I had a longer break.
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Looking back on another server, they were some popular names which regularly were “stolen” and people put reminder in their books to keep it… Funny times.
You know names like Hikaru or Sai.
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You are now mittens
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Thanks everyone 
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Lack of activity is putting it mildly in this case, you have to admit
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KGS removes accounts after 6 months of inactivity. I think that usernames are permanent on other popular go servers.
Perhaps 6 months is a bit too short but 2 years should be enough.
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I don’t see the logical link between those two things.
2 years is enough for me too.
Doesn’t appear to have any activity doesn’t mean they are not active at all. It could be that they only use that account for watching games or following Tournaments.
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Good point. I wouldn’t like someone to steal my Uberdude account just because I’ve not played a completed game in over a decade (I have an abandoned one in progress).
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On KGS, just logging on is enough to be considered as active. I don’t know if the OGS server records the last time when a user logged on.
Yeah, I think the fact that the account was clearly not used after it was initially created is significant
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I ought to think that there is still enough names on OGS to not have to take any"old names" specific policy. Or I missed something?
It’s easy to lose a name on KGS and would be the same be 6 months or two years. Not everyone is enough careful to not forget to log in once every 2 years
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In all the instances I am familiar with from 2019 to 2021, the accounts were 4 or more years old and had no significant number of games, say five or fewer (don’t remember exactly).
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In this case, the original “Mittens” account was created in 2007, played one game back then, and appears to have not had any activity since then.
I’m guessing that they have not logged in since 2007. However, I cannot say that with certainty, since that account actually predates the merger between OGS and NovaGS that happened in Oct 2013. Thus, there are no logs of whether they had any activity between 2007 and Oct 2013, but I can see with certainty that none exists after Oct 2013, since this user has not logged in after the merger in Oct 2013. They probably had not logged in for several years before the merger, but those older logs just aren’t available.
Note that this current forum that we are using was only launched in March 2014, so this user cannot have ever created an account here (since forum accounts are activated through logging in via your main site account). Before March 2014, OGS had a forum integrated into the main site, but that was deprecated with the launch of this Discourse-based forum.
It’s quite possible that this user has no idea that their OGS account still exists on this merged server that they have never used. If they somehow do come back and demand their name back, we can always revert this change, in deference to their priority.
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