A long time ago we built this site based on some software that we threw together and built a community that you all participate in. Now being DBAs, you'd think that we'd have done some planning, application analysis, set up DRI, etc.

NOT!

We were in a hurry to launch and our biggest concern was converting over tons of old content from the defunct Swynk site where the founders had met. So we used the Snitz forum software, a popular freeware package, expecting that it handled some of the basics, like unique keys for things like email, username, etc.

They didn't eventually we added some constraints around email, but we never got around to user names. When we rebuilt the site in 2007, there were application checks, but the developers didn't know what to do with existing duplicates. A good thing since who knows who would have ended up with "Steve Jones" as the username. Probably not me!

This hasn't been a big problem, though a permissions issue forced me to change to "Steve Jones - Editor" just so I could separate myself from all the other Steve Jones (over 20 here. Apparently a lot of people thought it was funny to register with Steve Jones. I haven't worried about it as it seems most of the others were jokes and I haven't seen any other Steve's posting.

However there are some "Dave"s, some "Mike"s and others and a few people complained. So I decided that I'd start cleaning up duplicates.

Starting this weekend, or next week, I'll be emailing to people with duplicate user names, asking them to change their display name to something unique. I'm going to go with seniority, so if you were the first person to register with a name, you'll get to keep it. Everyone else gets changed.

And I get to be Steve Jones, the one and only, at least on this site, again.