Forum:Different characters, same numbers

So I've been discussing with some of my friends about posting our SPARTAN characters that we have (before we had even heard of Halo Fanon, mind you!) onto the site. While intrigued upon finding this site despite many of us having spent years building up our characters, I discovered that several characters already existed with SPARTAN tags that we had labelled ourselves with (e.g. My character's Spartan Tag is A242, and there's another character using the Spartan Tag 242 as well)

Moreover, as there are quite a few of us, this is pretty much the case for all of my friends and I have told them that another SPARTAN already exists with the tag they have created prior to even hearing of the contradiction.

Yet my question is: Does this matter? I face the difficult decision of either putting forward plenty of characters used by both myself and many of my friends which could be seen to contradict other fan-created characters just purely to Spartan Tags or other reasons. The other decision is we all change our tags to something that doesn't currently exist in either canon or fan-made.

Someone please shed some light on this - I'm gonna be tearing hair out by the end of next week otherwise!

Sincerely, a mildly distressed Funkeh Munkeh.