Password Change

Panhandle Smoker,

Your handle was one of many that had been used more than once before we added the unique restrictions on the handle.

Since yours was first one registered (by just a few months), I modified the second to "panhandle smoker2" which should eliminate the duplicate. Hopefully, you can now save your profile.

Boring details follow....

The handle is a "reinterpreted" field that was originally designed to hold a person's name, which of course can be duplicated many times. But we needed a "forum name", separate from the "user name", which is considerable more limited in both length and content, so we "hijacked" an existing, redundant, name field for use with the handle.

Fast forward a few years, and we've accumulated a passel of duplicate handles floating around. Often it doesn't matter because only one or the other is in use at a time, but as our membership has grown, more and more the duplicates cause visible problems. And even before, occasional questions like, "I didn't post this, but it's under my name. But, when I click to view the profile it's not mine. What gives?"

So, since the original field was not designed to do what we're doing with it, we made a quick change to prevent any further duplicates. But this also prevents anyone with any duplicated information in their profile from saving them. And, again since the system was designed to detect errors w/in the browser, and since duplicate handles can be detected only by the server, the error message is very "unfriendly".