My notes on Discord tag re-rolling.

Discord Tag Rerolling.md

Discord Tag Rolling

When many users want to use a username that's taken, most software platforms solve this by just forcing them to choose another username. Discord has an interesting solution to this problem: giving people random 4 digit tags as well as their usernames! This allows for many users to have the same username while allowing each person to have a unique username that's easy to remember.

Some notes:

• Discord's tag system makes it possible to have 9_999 people with the same username, but they limit people from using popular names at a certain point.
• Discord's Nitro subscription system allows users to change their tag to any untaken tag. Their tags are randomized once their Nitro subscription ends.
• There is a rate limit of 2 name/tag changes per hour.

Keeping this in mind, most people think the only reason you can change your username is with Discord Nitro. There are only a few situations in which your Discord tag is changed.

1. Buying Discord Nitro (Support Discord! They're really nice :>)
2. When Discord Nitro expires, you'll be assigned a new random tag.
3. Changing your name where your current tag is taken.

#3 is pretty important. It's like a secret cool thing you can do. You can change your tag without Nitro! Let's say you're Mustan#1234. If you switch your name to Alice, but Alice#1234 is taken, your tag will be randomized.

Abusing this, you can randomize your tag until you get a really cool tag, like #0666. It's possible to change your name twice per hour, but your tag only changes if the new username#tag is taken.

If you want to check if a specific username#tag is taken, you can try sending a friend request to that account. If it's a valid account, you'll either get a success message, or a message saying that user doesn't accept friend requests. Either way, you'll find out if that user exists or not.

Another thing I like doing is using Dyno's ^discrim, or just searching discordhub

I find that lots of accounts have the same name as their tag. 0003#0003, 0523#0523, 1234#1234, and so on. Most of those are taken, but not all. You can also try popular names, such as "AA", "AB", "AC", "Alice", "Bob", "Eve", as long as the username#tag is already taken.

Cool project!

Curious about your thoughts on the migration to unique usernames:
https://discord.com/blog/usernames

I think the addition of a display name is a good step forward, but dislike the new username requirements.
There were a lot of problems with how unrestricted usernames used to be (aesthetic letters, invisible characters, or just hard to discern), but I feel like the new system is too restricted. Having it no longer be case sensitive is nice, but since it's now only alphanumeric + periods/underscores, users who had their usernames in other languages (eg chinese) will be forced to change their names into english.

I also really liked how many people could share the same username, and how difficult it was to guess/enumerate usernames. I'm guessing in simple/short usernames are going to face problems with getting unwanted friend requests/messages, whereas it's not really a problem with discriminators.