• Discord is ditching its #0000 suffixes.
• In its place, a two name system will be implemented with a username for folks to find you and a display name for you to express yourself.
• This change will rollout slowly with users being asked to update their names depending on when they joined Discord.

Gamers, and the other folks that use the app, the time has come to update your username as Discord announces it’s changing how people connect with each other on the platform.

Existing users will know the pain of trying to add a new friend on Discord what with the platform’s numbered suffixes. These numbers were part of Discord’s goal to allow users to pick any name they wanted.

As co-founder and chief technical officer at Discord, Stanislav Vishnevskiy explained, “When we were first building Discord, one of our top priorities was to let you give yourself just about any name you wanted, join your friend’s server and hop on voice chat quickly and easily. We didn’t want people to ever hit a screen that said ‘Your Desired Username is Taken.’ We also allowed usernames to be case-sensitive because originally, we didn’t even have a friend system, so no one had to type usernames manually. This became technical debt that we didn’t address adequately.”

While it may have been a solution at the time, these days the number suffix – known as a discriminator – serves only to confuse. The founder points out that over 40 percent of Discord users don’t know their own discriminator and almost half of all friend requests fail because of this suffix.

So to solve this problem while also still giving folks the freedom to have their unique screen name, Discord has a two-username solution.

Moving forward users will have a username and a display name. The username is the name that replaces the current Username#0000 system. This is the name that will be used for connecting with friends or telling profiles apart. Usernames can only comprise letters, numbers and a full stop or underscore.

The display name can be anything and can include anything such as emojis, special characters spaces and anything else you desire.

As you might imagine this process isn’t easy and presents a mammoth undertaking for Discord. As such, the process of choosing a new username and display name is going to happen slowly with Discord prompting users to make the change over the next few weeks.

“We want to be particularly considerate of longtime Discord users who have had their usernames for quite a while, so we will be assigning priority to choose your new username based on when you registered for Discord,” said Vishnevskiy.

Since the pandemic and lockdown, the platform has been on a March to being a platform for everybody and not exclusively gamers. Changing the username system is a small but welcome change that could help Discord become more accessible.