Username change - update tagging username

[nodle]

Does anyone know why when you change a username, that it seems to change it everywhere but the tag itself?

Here is a example. Let's say I tag @Member in multiple post in multiple forums. Later on @Member wants his username changed to something else. This will change his username etc. but the @Member never gets updated to point to the new user name. It still shows the old user name and when you hover it says "there was a problem loading this content". Now if you click on it, it will take you to their profile. Is this by default? Shouldn't it do a find and replace then change the @Member to the new tag?

[TSP]

It's not feasible to run through millions of posts to do replacements in post content like that. 

[nodle]

11 minutes ago, TSP said:

It's not feasible to run through millions of posts to do replacements in post content like that. 

Doesn't it already have to do that for the username on the left hand side for every post anyways? Plus the user profile? What is one more replacement? In fact the tagging may be less than the main username update.

 

[TSP]

Because it's an entirely different kind of replacement. You're pretty much comparing apples to bananas here. 

The mention is within the post content. It's a lot more work for the database to replace it. Not just because there is a lot of text surrounding it within the same column, but also because a mention could be in pretty much any post. There is also plenty of what ifs, situations and expected outcomes to take into consideration. 

Replacing an author name next to the post is much simpler, because you can limit the replacements to work on the single column used to store the author name on only the posts posted by member X. That is a lot simpler. 

Besides, the member name next to a post is usually retrieved from the members table either way, the cached author name value within the posts table is not used a lot. Instead it uses the author_id column in the posts-table to retrieve the member row/object with the name from another database table that contains the members.