Your name lives on your account
Your name, and the rest of what a form asks, now live on your account rather than being asked again in every household. Each household can still call you something else, field by field, and does so only when somebody deliberately fills the box in.
What was wrong
People were being called by the name of their house
When you made a household, the app had no name for you and the house did, so the house’s name went on your row. Members lists showed the creator called "The Peng House". Changing your details for that household did not fix it, because the list was reading a different field from the one you were writing.
Both halves are fixed. The name you are shown is the name you gave, and a household’s own name is never used as a person’s.
Where it lives now
Once, on the account
There is a "Your details" entry under Account in Settings. What you put there is what every household calls you.
A household can override it, and the override is per field. If your account says Robert Peng and you set your given name to Robbie in one house, that house calls you Robbie Peng and everywhere else calls you Robert Peng. You did not have to retype the surname and correcting it later corrects it in both.
The boxes in a household
Grey text, not a filled-in answer
The household form used to helpfully fill its name boxes with what it already knew about you. That was the wrong kind of helpful: an empty box there means "use my account’s", so saving a box somebody had filled in for you quietly froze that name into that household. Correcting your account afterwards would then have changed every house except the one you had opened.
Those boxes are empty now and show the account’s answer as grey placeholder text. It says the same thing without writing it down.
An address
Stays with the household
Your name and gender are account-level. An address is not, and there is no box for one on the account form, because where you live is something you publish to a particular household or do not. One that travelled to every house you joined would publish it by joining.
Signing up on the desktop
It now asks your name, like the phones
The iPhone and Android sign-up forms have always asked your name. The desktop one never did, so desktop accounts arrived with no name at all. It asks now.
Not built
Somebody who has given no name anywhere shows as a row with a blank name rather than a placeholder. That is deliberate: the app does not invent something to call you.
Names recorded before this change are not rewritten. An old household row that held the house’s name is ignored rather than displayed, so nobody is called by their house any more, but nobody’s record was edited to achieve it.
Where it runs
- Server
- Yes, 17 September
- iPhone, Android, desktop
- Yes, 17 September