[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Show a list of previous usernames of a user (Issue #3559)

[Frederik Ramm]

It is true that a bad actor can use the name change facility to make their activities more difficult to track. People also do silly things like changing their username to something like "your mother" and then befriending others which results in them getting an email "your mother added you as a friend". If change their name back quickly, the recipient has no chance of finding out who it was. (Obviously "your mother" is a harmless variant of this game, the message could also be a threatening or demeaning one.) 

Third-party services relying on .osc files will only detect user name changes when an edit has been made with a certain name; shenanigans like the above will not be detectable from .osc files.

A proper recording of user name changes would help reduce the confusion such trolls can create, but they could then do other things like creating a new account and deleting it immediately. Also, users might legitimately want to change their name for privacy reasons (having e.g. used their real name initially and later wanting to switch to a pseudonym). An easily accessible list of historic user names would remove that possibility. 

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