Due to some spam issues (harvested BattleTag’s so that gold sellers can send you in-game requests) I was having over on Asia, I decided to do a BattleTag change back in August. Boy, that was just a bad decision. First of all, it caused part of my in-game friends list to vanish. Second of all, all of my Battle.net postings prior to August were not re-indexed to my new ID.
Posted the following on the website bug report forum back on August 25:
Hi, I recently changed my Battletag (previous was Murasama#1820) and all my prior Battle.net forum posts are now no longer linked to my current Battletag. Thus I’m finding it difficult to reference a lot of my prior posts from before the change.
As far as the web profile, the forum did update that part to my new Battletag name (LordMurasama) and shows the proper change on all of those older posts. However, when I click on my profile and click on the “view my posts” icon, it only shows posts made after the Battletag change.
The following forum search brings up all my prior postings:
The following is one of my posts prior to my Battletag change:
Notice the profile is properly updated to LordMurasama#1950. However, when clicking “view my posts”, it will only display the posts made after the change.
I believe this is a bug in the forum code but was not sure of the best way to report this issue. Thanks in advance for any assistance!
October 8th Update:
Just a quick update….
The old profile URL above now no longer redirects (it just 404’s) so I suppose this was just temporary and designed to expire. Prior posts from before the battletag change however remain in limbo.
Thus the only way now to verify that most of those older posts were made by me are by using the above search or on posts like the following which I had edited (it still shows the old battletag on the edited line):
November 7th Update:
Great! <sarcasm>
Now with the forum re-indexing, all of those old posts are now completely unsearchable and not even re-indexed under my changed battletag.
See my prior post above which links to an old post which had been edited that has my old battletag, and notice that while it is attributed to my now changed ID, it doesn’t show up in the re-indexed postings.
Seriously, do you web folks not test situations like this out when one BattleTag name change is something offered as part of Battle.net?
December 11th Update:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/9753675799?page=1#4
Another month and counting… and still an echo chamber here when it comes to issues related to how this forum fails at handling tasks that should be standard fare in 2013…
I’ve now resorted to using whatever Google search can find, copying the contents of those posts, and linking back to them using my blogspot account (just so I can at least have an easier way to reference past postings).
So moderator, please feel free to just lock this post since I’ve managed to waste a lot of my own personal time by mining most of my old postings and re-saving them elsewhere – as there is little in the way of support here to address these kind of issues by the team that is supposed to be tasked with handling this area.
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Going to be very blunt here. If the IT/technical personnel that is handling the entire Battle.net forum code (front and backend) were ever employed by me, they would all be fired on the spot for gross incompetence. The entire system is awful from losing the original user you’re quoting (previews fine but disappears when posting) to where you get periodically logged out when attempting to post/reply regardless of whether or not you have the “keep me signed on” checked off. And then you have the above where something as fundamental as handling an ID change, does not take into account ones forum postings. Then from a Diablo III perspective, the fact that we’re still saddled with the beta avatar.
I used to run dial-up BBS’s back in the 80’s and 90’s and even the free software back then (Fido, Searchlight, RemoteAccess, etc) with it’s built-in messaging systems, worked far better. Heck, even the first version of phpBB is light years better than this pile of junk known as the Battle.net forums.
