Choose a username

A username is optional. It is separate from the email address you sign in with, and it is what other people would see: your profile lives at tincograph.com/@yourname. Set it on your account page under Username.

The rules

Length	3 to 30 characters
Allowed	a–z, 0–9, full stop, underscore
First and last character	A letter or a digit, never . or _
Case	Stored in lower case; Ada and ada are the same name

Capitals and surrounding spaces are trimmed away rather than rejected, so typing Ada gets you ada.

Hyphens are not allowed and neither is anything outside that set, which keeps a username usable in a URL without escaping and stops two names existing that look identical.

Names you cannot have

Some are reserved: admin, support, api, help, root, tincograph and similar, so that nobody can pretend to be us. Every page on this site is reserved too — docs, pricing, status, blog, account, legal and the rest — because profiles share the same address space as pages, and a username that collides with a page is a link that means two things.

A short blocklist rejects the obvious offensive substrings. It is deliberately small rather than a moderation system.

If a name is already taken you are told so, and a name in use by someone else is never quietly adjusted into something free.

Changing it

Once every thirty days. If you try sooner, the error tells you the date the next change becomes available.

When you change it, your old username is parked for thirty days. Nobody else can claim it in that time, and neither can a stranger stumble into the traffic from links people saved to your old address. After thirty days it returns to the pool.

Setting the same name you already have is not a change and does not start the cooldown.

What the errors mean

Message	Meaning
Invalid format	It breaks one of the rules in the first table
That username is reserved	It is on the reserved list
That username isn’t allowed	It matched the blocklist
That username is already taken	Someone has it, or it is parked from a recent change
Once every 30 days	Your last change was less than thirty days ago

Your username appears in your data export. See Export or delete your data.