A studio has posted a warning to fellow indie developers after it was unable to claim its own username on Discord.
In a Twitter thread, indie team Rusty Lake detailed the trouble it has experienced securing its own username for its 240K+ member Discord community.
Discord announced plans to change its usernames earlier this month. At present, usernames are case sensitive and have a four-digit identifier, called a discriminator, appended to create a unique username, but the new changes remove the need for the discriminator, meaning you don’t have to remember the random number combination when trying to add friends.
The problem, however, is that the staggered rollout means some are getting the chance to secure preferences earlier than others, which includes username squatters.
Now we have a risk of impersonation + extra legal costs to file a possible trademark infringement. In any case @Discord_support was helpful enough to respond with an automatic response email to this issue and the follow up is directing us to another helpdesk.
— Rusty Lake 🚣♂️ Underground Blossom 🚇🌸 (@rustylakecom) May 19, 2023
“A warning for all the indie devs waiting to claim their own username [at] Discord,” the Cube Escape developer tweeted.
“We just received an email that we, as Verified Owners, could finally submit a new username and wow… ‘rustylake’ is already taken! If we as a server owner with 240K+ members can’t even claim it…
“Now we have a risk of impersonation and extra legal costs to file a possible trademark infringement,” the studio added via a separate tweet. “In any case, Discord support was helpful enough to respond with an automatic response email to this issue and the follow-up is directing us to another helpdesk.
“Really wondering how they are rolling out this new feature… if a random user can squat on established (server) brand names.”
At the time of writing, Discord has yet to respond publicly to Rusty Lake’s comments.