A while back I asked the question in the forum if there was a way
to change a list's short name and then the forum went down before I
saw the final answer As I remember, the first answer was that it was not possible

The other issue is if you could, would you want to? Since you're
gonna break any links to the archives, any forms used for
subscriptions and links embedded in emails for subscription/ unsubscription confirmation, etc, etc, etc That's why there's a,
"hey! Can't change this! So don't!" clause That's why I don't make
it an option - I'd be swamped with, "my forms/links/archives don't
work anymore!" problems and I'd ask, "did you change the list
shortname" and people would say, "yes "

I then asked if it could be changed by searching every file in the
whole installation and replacing the old short name with a new one
Would that work?

With the default backend - no, it's a very Bad Idea, since most of
these files are not plain text files - they're binary, doing any hand- editing to these files will corrupt them And then there's files
named after the list shortname

With the SQL backend, I guess you could, but again - it's probably
a bad idea, because of the issues I mentioned

For the SQL backend, it's probably about three queries:

UPDATE dada_archives    set list = 'newname' where list = 'oldname';
UPDATE dada_settings    set list = 'newname' where list = 'oldname';
UPDATE dada_subscribers set list = 'newname' where list = 'oldname';

Where, "newname" is the list short name you want and "oldname" is the
old list short name

Another issue would be your usage log - it'll still hold the value of
the original list name, which may break things and make searching it
a bit tougher And off the top of my head, that should be all the
fire and brimstone I can think of

You've been warned :)

If someone wants this capability, I'd encourage you to make a plugin ;)

Cheers,