Jeremy discusses "buddy list spam" (the official term is "contact list") and asks:

> What I’m not clear about is what happens once you’ve renamed a contact. Does that name stay forever, whatever the owner of that profile does to their profile name? Seems to.

Yes, when you rename a contact locally, it overrides whatever neat tricks the other person is doing with his/her name to get to the top of your contact list. Formerly, people also used to communicate a lot of other fun facts in their full name, such as their timezone and what they're up to today and all that. And when you renamed someone, you lost that info, since the locally assigned name was always used. However, with the introduction of [version 2.0](http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2005/12/skype_20_beta_free_video_calli.html), it should no longer be a problem since timezone is now a separate profile field and there's also a new "mood message" field which you can use to publish all sorts of fun stuff about yourself, but which doesn't affect your position in others' contact lists.

So when you find yourself subjected to contact list spam, just rename your contacts and be done with it. And should it ever happen that you want to revert back to the names that the contacts have set themselves, just use the "Rename" function again and clear the name you assigned -- Skype then displays the contact's own name again.