My guess is the the username "Tosh"
was already in use on Houzz.com and since it was Gardenweb being
assimilated into Houzz, well... you lose. In fact---> http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/users/tosh

However, it seems you can click "Your Houzz", "Edit Profile", and change your "First name" to display whatever you want.

Let's see, I'm changing mine from "chuggerguy" to "Richard (chuggerguy)".

Yeah, looks like that worked fine.

I think what's happening is :

Gardenweb user's names were already on file as always, waiting for them when they came into Houzz.

But Houzz put up that very innocuous looking alert - if you can even call it that - at the top of the page that says "Trying to access your GardenWeb Account? Confirm Your Account".

Because it doesn't stand out, and there was no forewarning of the move to Houzz, most people arrived on the new Houzz page a bit in shock and confusion, and their first thought was, "Ok, I guess I have to register with Houzz now," and looked around for a registration page.

That fresh registration without going through the "Confirm your Account" made it look like you were a separate and additional user to the Houzz registration process.

For the rest of this comment, I continued it over on the "What's with this new Houzz thing?" thread.

http://ths.gardenweb.com/discussions/2833422/whats-with-this-new-houzz-thing?n=23

By the way, is it possible that you could change the topic line to something like "Gardenweb user names already taken and not available ?"

Then perhaps put "wtf" at the end.

;-)

kbarb,

That's the way it was for me, too... thinking I had to sign up all over again because it appeared my username was taken by someone at Houzz. Well, one I remembered the email address I used to sign up with GW ;-) I got a successful confirmation email and got signed up here with my GW name. Whew! Not the smoothest transition! :-)

kbarb,

My subject line should have been "wtf!" :-)

At first I thought GW had been hijacked.

I hate this!

I used to be kudzu9 and had to change to kudzu_9 because my old screen name was supposedly taken (probably due to some glitch in the new system) as I doubt anyone on Houzz was using it.

I believe in always trying to be fair. I just wanted to post that after a week and several exchanges with Houzz, they did manually unlock MY e-mail address from another user account and returned it to me for use here on the forum. They were very attentive and polite about it.

DA

DA, are you the member who has had an incorrect email address tied to your GW account for years?
Just wondering.
Sue

No. I had this concern following the merger. Some ghost account ended up with MY e-mail address that I have been using for computer forums and computer related matters since 1997.

DA

I saw my account has a post I had made in an Energy Savings or Roofing materials forum back in the middle 90's. I was thinking that must have been another forum ... so they have purchased other forums too in the past - not just gardenweb.