Well...I don't know how how to propose this...

Us legion leaders sometimes don't know where our new recruits come from. Did they come from a rival, a dead legion, or from someone who has a lock on our base?

We should be able to see a simple history of legions that people applying to a legion have. The history shouldn't be comprehensive and should only be limited to 2 or 3 past legions.

So for example;

The Dysonians - June 21st (Date of departure)
The Dominion - June 22nd (Date of departure)

+1.

As long as this happens it would be nice to see our own full legion list of all the legions we joined. It could also lead to medals/rewards for staying loyal to legions. Also if you dropped out of the legion for a few days to get the lone conquer medal it wouldn't count you as leaving as long as you didn't join another legion during that timer period and it was less then 2 days.

For the players joining maybe a week or 2 weeks back log on their legion history to see how many different legions they have jumped/been kicked out of.

Do you expect a spy to be honest about his origins? +1 to the original idea.

exactly.

Players should have the option in ships settings of making their legion history visible or not. And then I could be forever suspicious of any that hid theirs.

I don't think this information is currently tracked though, so it would only be from the implementation date on, which is a little less interesting, but still would be cool.

perhaps only keep track of the last 3 legions the player has been in . otherwise +1

i would say not limit it by number, but time.
they could easily pop in and out of a few open recruitment legions and make that useless.

+1 I like it

I agree a history would be useful to have. I suspect that ICBLF is right and that the current implementation only has what your current legion is. Having a 30-day or 2 month history should be more than sufficient. Give the date range and legion though:

Start - End : Legion 1
Start - End : Legion 2
Start - End : Legion 3
... and so on...

Most recent date first, and oldest date at end of the list.

As already mentioned, the game doesn't currently track that information. To add this feature, a somewhat major retooling of the player database would be required. Very minimal utility for an awful lot of work...

Adding 1-3 columns is not a "major retooling".

When you consider filling those columns with the appropriate information and coding required to access said information... Yeah, it's somewhat major. Then when you consider how many inactive players there are with no legion information, is something like this really worth Dan's time? I think not.

The purpose of this suggestion is anti-spy. That said, there is no particular need to "go back in history" so to speak. So just record new infos and new info only and it'd be fine.
From a database implementation standpoint, for optimal performance, there would need to be two new tables. This is because of the open recruitment workaround mentioned, as such the record would need to be time based as opposed to last X legion. Which means that there is no finite number of column needed, so it needs to be kept track in a seperate table.

Here is how I propose it to be, if it were to be added:
legionRecord_timekeep
ID, primary key, auto increasing
Player ID, foregin key to player table
Time, date(date of change)
legionRecord_retrieval
ID, primary key, a concatation of player ID and the ID of the same record on legionrecord_timekeep *
Player ID, foreign key to player table
Legion ID, foreign key to legion table
Time, date(date of change)
Record ID, foregin key to legionREcord_timekeep

*purpose of a concatenated primary key i so that the database auto sorts the data in a "grouped by player" fashion by default. This will reduce the time required to retrieve the history of a given player. There might be ways to get around that, but generally speaking the database operations would be optimized if it's done this way. The timekeep table is used for deletion of record, as it's stored in order of entry. Which means the oldest record will expire first and thus the game only need to keep checking the top entries for removal operation. The timekeep also maintain the player ID info, this allows the removal operation to directly ask for the specific record to be removed from the retrieval table, thus theortically reducing amount of time needed to find it(as it's easiest to find something by its primary key by default) Ofc, based on exact database implementation, there might be better ways to optimize this and chances are retrieval won't be asked for too often so a simple whole-table-lookup might work(in which case storing all info in timekeep and only using that one table will suffice). But from a paranoid frequent-retrieval-needed standpoint, this should work well. It have a slightly higher per-record upkeep but a lower per-checkup upkeep.

Another thought on this. The legion history only needs to be made available to officers/leaders when viewing an applicant to the legion. I can't think of a reason for anyone to need to view the information under normal everyday play (e.g. looking at battle tab, alerts). So the database access (and associated time) to get the information will be limited. The history should also just be an additional tab (visible only when player is viewed from the legion application area) which minimizes any changes to the UI.