Changing your Team Name
Your Team Name is your public identity throughout Mentored by Mutts. It is the name other members see on your stories, your comments and your Team profile. It is not your password, and it is not how you sign in.
How to change it
Go to Profile → Settings → Team Name, and choose Change Team Name. You can also reach the same screen from Edit Profile.
Type the name you would like. As you type, we tell you whether it is available. When you are happy with it, choose Review My Change — this does not change anything yet. It opens a confirmation screen showing your current name, your new name, and the date you would next be allowed to change it. You then confirm with your password.
The 60-day rule
You may change your Team Name once every 60 days.
This is not there to make life difficult. Your Team Name is how the community recognises you, and a name that changes constantly makes it hard for friends to find you and follow what your Team is doing. After a change, the screen tells you the exact date you may change it again.
What stays with your Team
Everything. Changing your Team Name changes the name and nothing else. Your Team keeps:
- your stories, photos and videos
- your friends and followers
- your comments, likes and saved posts
- your PawPrint Points
- your badges and awards
- your Division and your Fetch It Forward League history
- your mutt profiles and your own profile
- your account settings
No new account and no new Team is created. Behind the scenes, everything you own is attached to your account rather than to the name, which is why the name can move without anything following it.
What happens to your old Team Name
Your former Team Name is held for 60 days. During that time nobody else can take it, so an identity you have just stepped away from cannot be picked up by a stranger. You may take it back yourself at any point, subject to the same 60-day rule.
Links to your profile are not affected. A profile address does not contain your Team Name, so nothing anyone has bookmarked or shared will break.
Signing in has not changed
You sign in with your email address and your password. Changing your Team Name does not change either, and it does not change your account.
Choosing a name
A Team Name is 3 to 30 characters and may contain letters, numbers, spaces, apostrophes, dots, dashes and underscores. It cannot be a name already in use, a name that impersonates Mentored by Mutts or our staff, or a name that does not meet our Community Standards.
If you did not make the change
Every Team Name change sends a confirmation to your account email address. If you receive one you did not expect, change your password straight away and contact us at pawscratch@mentoredbymutts.com. We keep a record of every change, so we can tell you when it happened and help you put it right.