San Francisco, May 5 (IANS): Popular chatting platform Discord has updated its username system to make it easier for users to connect with their friends and to give them more control over their identity on the platform.

This change will require most users to modify their usernames since Discord will no longer be using the four-number suffix (also called a discriminator) as a means of distinguishing between individuals with identical usernames.

"Over the coming weeks, every user will become eligible to change their username from their old username with discriminators (#0000) to a new username (@username) without discriminators. All users will eventually be required to pick a new, unique username to use Discord," read a blogpost by Discord.

From now on, the username will be a unique combination of letters and numbers, preceded by the "@" symbol, meaning that users will no longer have a four-number discriminator appended to their username.

For example, if a user used to be "PhiBi#8936", its new default display name will now be "PhiBi".

Users will also get to choose a non-unique display name that can include special characters, spaces, emojis, and non-Latin characters.

Moreover, the company said that long-time Discord users will be prioritised, so the longer they have been on Discord, the sooner they will be able to choose a new name.

"We recognise that this is a big change. There may be hiccups with this process, and it may be tough to part ways with that '#0001' that's meant a lot to you over the years. We'll be doing everything we can to manage things as smoothly as possible," said Discord co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy.

Further, Discord mentioned that the previous username and discriminator will continue to function as an alias once the numerical tag is removed, which means that users' old usernames can still be found by their friends.