Hi all,
I'd just like to apologize for any of you who have been having trouble with your profile having some (or all) of it's history deleted. As October 28 was the last day before people could change their names once again, I had to do a pretty massive organization update to the database and clean out a lot of clutter accumulated from the first name change round. Unfortunately, more got cleared than was supposed to be.
Note that this only affected a few accounts who had recently changed their display names and did not effect anyone else. But believe me when I say I'm just as disappointed in this situation as you all are. To be honest, Jagex has really done their best to ensure that, in terms of coding, keeping track of name changes is an absolute nightmare (they've publicly stated that they don't want to allow tracking sites to process name changes) - which has caused a lot of issues for RuneTrack and other tracking sites. I've done what I could to keep things from just falling apart, but I'm afraid not everything worked out as I intended.
While there are clearly some bugs to be worked out, know that I have done a considerable amount of work in updating the systems to ensure that RuneTrack will still be able to function despite all of the name changes. I've created a Name Changing page which will be released soon that allows users to enter their old & new display name, and the program will do a variety of verification checks to confirm the merge (ensure that the old name doesn't exist on the hiscores, ensure the new name does exist on the hiscores, compare the stats of the old & new display names to make sure they are plausibly close enough to each other, etc).
I also just recently manually confirmed in-game about 400 display name changes and merged their RuneTrack accounts, which was largely successful. One of the reasons I haven't made an announcement like this in a while was because I was pretty busy with designing all the new system as quickly as I could before the name changing update and its fallout occurred.
I'm also working on building a new feature that will allow display names to be tracked and traced over periods of time (for example - a time line of a specific display name shown over the length of the year, and how many accounts went through it and at what specific dates).
There's still a lot of work yet to do before things are all cleaned up and the new system is fully functional, but we'll get through it. I'd again like to apologize for the recent complications and thank all of you for your support and patience as features are restored.
~Sword
RuneTrack Administrator
