Alicornutopia

In other news, there has been at least one voice expressing that the name 'Alias' is weird, and while I would not normally bother to rename something (like see how I still haven't renamed Board to Continuity under the hood) alias is technically a reserved word in Rails, so I'm sort of inconsistently going with alias where it's safe and character_alias or calias where it's not, and if people have better ideas (Pseudonym maybe?) I'm all ears.

I was logged out yesterday. Until this I thought I must have just hit the wrong button again, but now I think you might have logged too many people out. Is there a chance you also missed some people that should have been logged out?

Would fork work? Then you have the Maitimo template, Space character, Evening fork.

I am very confident that it will not log you out if you have a salt_uuid set properly (and your account does; if it did not yesterday that could have grabbed you, but it won't again, and I don't recall seeing your name last time I checked).

Suggestions so far: Alias, Pseudonym, Alt, Name, Nickname, Epithet, Moniker, Fork
I have expressed vague aesthetic preference for single words and vague technical preference for not-alias. Thoughts expressed so far: pseudonym might express that it's a "fake" name, alt is overloaded, nickname is also not necessarily what it's used for but maybe closer, epithet often has negative connotations. Fork I think might also be overloaded; I've seen aliases desired for things like "Worm heroes should have their Cape name and personal name both available", and that's not really a fork per se. Presently Pseudonym and Nickname are leading the pack in my head.

fork doesn't work if the feature was used for something like this (deep link) in hyperspace routes, where aestrix used two accounts to show different mindsets the same instance of the character gets into.

I prefer nickname, and I'm not wholly convinced the "template nickname" field isn't made redundant with this feature.

I think it's probably redundant, I made an issue to follow up, but it might need some small tweaks first? Like, there's a Nickname column in your character list that might need some sort of equivalent in the new Nickname-or-whatever system.

"Primary aliases" or such have been suggested to replace this, so e.g. Aether/Boots can have both "Aether, Boots" in the nickname column (and then non-primary aliases, such as if Boots masqueraded around as "Felicity" for a while, would not be shown there but would be on the individual character's page).

"Variant"? Very generic though.

I reiterate my previous remark in the Terminology thread that I think we're at the point where it makes sense to support an arbitrary hierarchy of inherit-with-changes rather than hardcoded template → character → alias.

The thing I'm using aliases for is definitely not forks, and even more definitely not alts.

"Nickname" seems vaguely acceptable to be, and "variant" slightly less so, and "pseudonym" slightly less than that; epithet and moniker both seem a little silly but not actively wrong, and I like epithet much better of the two; alt and fork and name seem actively wrong.

Reasons: "pseudonym" feels to me like it connotes a thing that any given person is likely to have at most one of, a secondary name after their original one. Epithet gets the plurality across much better than moniker, and nickname much better than pseudonym. Variant does the plurality connotation really well but doesn't really have a 'name' connotation at all. Alt and fork are both terms for things that aren't the thing this is for, and name is already the term for the primary name of a character.

I would be unhappy about moving from what we have now to an arbitrary hierarchy of inherit-with-changes. I think such a hierarchy would be really hard to design in a way that retained all the useful functionality of the current system. For example, when I click on a character's name in a thread, I go to that character's character page regardless of what alias they were using at the time, and not, say, to their template page; this is good and correct and seems hard to replicate in a more freeform system.

What are you using aliases for, then?

And I agree about arbitrary hierarchy not being a good idea. It is more elegant in the abstract, but less practically useful.