Make a Name For Yourself WRITTEN BY Eric Freytag

I’m excited to announce that in one week, we’re taking a small step that will help names on PucaTrade be more like actual usernames. We tried the nickname experiment—where anyone could change their username as often as they’d like—but the general consensus is that it was better before.

A Brief History of Usernames on Puca

For the first couple years of PucaTrade’s existence, usernames were immutable and permanent. This was consistent with how usernames worked on most sites, and it made sense for PucaTrade as well. Around 2014, many websites started to change the standards for usernames by allowing them to be changed at any time (logic being: “Hey, why not?”). At the time we felt the same, so we changed usernames to nicknames and allowed them to be adjustable.

Unfortunately, I think this has had a negative impact on the community. Names are incredibly important; they help strangers to become friends and allow us to build relationships and shared history with others in our community. At is core, PucaTrade is a community, and nothing is more important than cultivating it as such.

Just to give an example of this, in the early days of Puca I used to remember people that I had traded with or seen on the Send page months prior. Sometimes I’d even build up a mental recognition of their collection, noticing things like: “Oh yeah! Doublewide is the guy who hooked me up with two Oracle of Mul-Daya’s for my two EDH decks,” or “Ah that’s right—TheUnderground is the dude who hooks me up with fat trades every time my cards arrive in his maibox.” It’s been a while since that’s happened, and I think a step toward that is a step in the right direction.

How Will This Work?

Really, the only thing that’s changing is that starting Thursday 2/16, instead of being able to change your username infinitely, you’ll be able to change it only once more. You can change it on 2/16 or any day after, but that freebie is all you’ll get.

How will this impact bonuses and bounties?

Now that we’ve launched Promoted Trades, we’ve already started to see far fewer people with advertisements in the place of usernames.

For that reason, I think this will be relatively low-impact.

The recent launch of Promoted Trades has brought an additional level of security, automation, and oversight to the process of transferring bonuses. Now that we’ve built a formal way to offer and redeem bonuses for trades, there should really be no need to offer bounties outside the Promoted Trades system. But if you disagree and you’d prefer to offer or participate in bounties outside our formal Promoted System, please be aware that you do so at your own risk, and that our site admins will not be able to mediate and resolve cases if a dispute should arise. We simply don’t have the resources to settle these cases, especially now that we’ve built a safe & automated way to offer bonuses.

I believe that this will have a significant and positive impact on the Puca community. It may seem like a small thing, but I think it will be both welcoming and refreshing.



Thanks for reading!