Your name is yours again
A volunteer who had just put an ADS-B receiver on the roof wrote to us with a small, awkward problem. He had signed up, changed his name during the first-run dialog, and ended up with a page whose address was his full legal name. He could not find anywhere to change it. He was right: there was nowhere.
Here is what actually happened, because the shape of it is more interesting than the bug.
When you sign in for the first time, a dialog opens asking for a display name. He typed the name he wanted, and it worked — the profile picked it up straight away. What that field does not do is change your handle: the @name under your avatar, the thing that makes up the address of your page. That lived on a second tab in the same dialog, and the dialog opens on the first one. Typing a name in the obvious box, watching the page accept it, and concluding the job is done is not a mistake anybody should have to avoid.
The second half is worse and entirely ours. That dialog only exists inside the flight client. Your profile page, the receiver dashboard, the station ladder — all of those render instead of the game rather than inside it, so none of them carried the editor. Over time the ways into it disappeared one by one until the only route left was a link you would have to already know. For somebody who signed up to feed data and never pressed "Take off", the handle picked at sign-up was permanent. So, for that matter, were their display name and their profile photo. You could change the banner across the top of your profile, but not the name printed on it.
What changed
Open your own profile and you will find a small pencil next to your handle. It opens name, photo and handle together, on the page where all three are printed, and it works whether or not you ever fly.
Two things worth knowing before you use it. Your first handle change is free; after that there is a cooldown, so the field is not somewhere to experiment. And your old handle keeps working — anyone following a link you shared earlier gets redirected to the new one, so renaming yourself does not quietly break the post you put in a forum thread last week.
The first-run dialog has also stopped being coy. Underneath the display-name box it now prints the actual address of your page, with a button that takes you to the field that changes it. The mix-up that started this is still an easy one to make; it should at least be visible the moment it happens.
The part we have not fixed
Character skins, a leftover from the voxel worlds, are still only editable from the old dialog. That one is tangled up with a larger question about those worlds, and we would rather answer it properly than bolt on another control.
Thanks to the feeder who wrote in rather than shrugging and living with it. A report like that is worth more than it looks: the fault was not in the rename, which worked fine, but in there being no door to it — and that is precisely the kind of thing that is invisible from the inside.