Ack! My bad! Apologies for the duplicate thread there!
That could certainly work. My only concern is that it would require the users to take a manual step, which they might not know how to do, and may only think to do it after the issue has occurred. I see in that original thread, there is also the idea of having a checkbox to display full names on the client side. That’s also a good idea, but it does suffer from a similar issue of putting the onus on each user in the room to resolve the issue individually.
Alternatively, what about something like name colors for every user? That could be available to all users, all the time, and provide an easy way to differentiate between characters, even when there aren’t duplicate names in the room. Users would still need to check who’s who in instances when there are multiple characters with the same name in a room, but they would only need to check once, rather than for every message. (Also it’s so much easier to check on mobile now, thank you for that <3)
This could be customizable for each character by their owner, like what Twitch has for chat names. We could run into a situation where two people with the same first name set the same name color, but at that point, that just turns into user shenanigans rather than a systematic issue.
One slight issue with this is that it could present an accessibility issue for users with colorblindness or who may need higher contrast, so perhaps displaying these custom colors could be disabled on the client side.
