This is caused by a design flaw in many many modules.

It is basically caused by the fact that the database tables store character names and not character IDs.

Therefore when a player changes his name the bot doesn't recognize it.

The fix for this is to alter the database scheme for most (all?) modules to store character id instead of storing player names.

However this isn't as straight forward as it might sound as aochat->get_uname() doesn't appear to work very well all the time. That appears to be a limitation caused by FC servers.

An alternative would be to store a charid->name table that would effectively be a aochat->get_uname/id cache. This is fesable but it would still require modifying all the modules.

I'm adding this to taskmanager as something that ought to be fixed in 0.5.x as 0.5 will most likely force a re-write of modules in any case.

Storing by character ID isn't always going to work either. If someone deletes their character and then has FunCom restore it, the new character will have a new character ID.

My understanding is that character name change is only available to players under L30, unless a GM decides that someone name is offensive on some level and must be changed...

Basically, there's no 100% guarantee that a character name or character ID won't change. Thankfully it's usually an isolated thing and not really a big deal.