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Back in January 2009 when I signed up for Twitter, I was sad (but not completely surprised) to see that @SlyCat had already been taken and so I did what I normally do in this circumstance, and went with @SlyCatUK. The old @SlyCat account had one tweet in it from 2008 and 7 follows from equally dead accounts. Had the account been in active use I wouldn't have been quite as annoyed, however as it had clearly been abandoned, I wondered if I could claim it for my own. I only really decided to look into this possibility this evening and a bit of Googling didn't really help and so I ended up raising a ticket with Twitter. Amazingly, in the same evening, I have now renamed my account to simply @SlyCat. The definitive article!
Here's how I did it -
1) Log in to Twitter and then visit http://twitter.com/help/escalate. Raise a question regarding "Inactive username" and put some text in the box, but it's not that relevant what you say as you get a robotic auto-response.
2) When you receive the automatic response, it tells you they only contest ownership of accounts for copyright use, etc. However it goes on to say if you're trying to claim an abandoned account, reply with simply the username you want them to remove, and they will assess the account.
3) In my case, probably because the account had been unused for over 2 years, had one tweet and wasn't following anyone, after around 3 hours, I was emailed again to say the account had been purged. I then simply logged into Twitter, then settings and changed my username to the one which had been purged and the job was done!
I see a number of other furs have usernames which they may want to change for the same reason so I hope this handy guide comes in handy!
If you're not currently following me, as you can probably tell by now, my username is @SlyCat :)
Here's how I did it -
1) Log in to Twitter and then visit http://twitter.com/help/escalate. Raise a question regarding "Inactive username" and put some text in the box, but it's not that relevant what you say as you get a robotic auto-response.
2) When you receive the automatic response, it tells you they only contest ownership of accounts for copyright use, etc. However it goes on to say if you're trying to claim an abandoned account, reply with simply the username you want them to remove, and they will assess the account.
3) In my case, probably because the account had been unused for over 2 years, had one tweet and wasn't following anyone, after around 3 hours, I was emailed again to say the account had been purged. I then simply logged into Twitter, then settings and changed my username to the one which had been purged and the job was done!
I see a number of other furs have usernames which they may want to change for the same reason so I hope this handy guide comes in handy!
If you're not currently following me, as you can probably tell by now, my username is @SlyCat :)
