Username Changing

EDIT: dA Finally did it! I don't believe it! They did it! Thank you everybody for the support, and I'll be leaving this deviation up.

--Formerly YamisLover </edit>

FAQ #112: How do I change my deviantART username?

I know a few people on deviantart, like me, who've been on dA for a long time. As such, some of us named ourselves based off of what our obsession was back then (for the fandom-based artists). Personally, I'm one of them; hence YAMIsLover. (Yu-Gi-Oh, for anyone who doesn't know)

But as such, we'd eventually grow bored or even dislike our usernames. I think dA should have the option of letting us in the community change our names; I know other websites, such as Gaia Online.com and Horse Isle.com, offer the option even for just paying players/users to change our names, and I really don't see why we on dA shouldn't have it. Personally, I (and I know some others feel the same way) wouldn't want to go through the trouble of making a new dA account and then lugging a crapton of deviations (especially for people who have a freakishly high number of deviations, like over 300) and then loosing all of our comments, stats, pageviews, and such.

Critique is seriously and highly encouraged. Please do offer any critique, gentle or harsh, if you have any! Also feel free to submit to groups.

EDIT: Decided I wanted to add some more to this.

Some people have brought up a very good point; some people may change their usernames (and conveniently forget to post a journal about it) and then it leaves their watchers confused, thinking that it may be someone they don't know. Well, of course, in that manner, I wish I had thought of it before, an alert would be in order for sudden username changes. I'll post that later, when I have the time and motivation. :L

Another thing brought up is about broken links all around dA since our icons and links appear on our pages, people's userpages, forums, and such. Honestly, with enough coding and beta testing, there could be a system that automatically changes links appearing beside our names/icons/ect (except for the user-posted ones) to our new username and saying something like "Congrats, your name is available. It may take a few hours or so for your new name to fully take effect. Be patient!" like they do on Gaia Online. However, another thing we could do is attach user ID's, which will make this a hell of a lot easier for changing names. After all, all of our deviations have such numbers, so attaching one to our usernames wouldn't be so difficult, so instead of having "This-Mecha-Junkie.deviantart.com", it would be "35634899.deviantart.com", but still have our current links to use as 'temporary links', like on fanfiction.net. (For anybody unfamiliar with FF.net, for posting your link on other sites, you have two links; one with your current username and another with your user ID.)

And for anybody who just says "make a new account" and shiz, most people (like me) would rather keep a crappy username we came up with at 11 years old than loose our stats, and in that case, why not just have the dA server move stats and deviations from the current user to the new one?