Optionally offer a display name instead of "first last (user)" on user pages?

I like the idea of using real names for display. It continues with the theme of making the issue queues a bit more human.

I'm going to have someone take a look at possible drawbacks of turning on the real name module. If it doesn't add too much load, then we'll follow up on this request with the working groups and get buy in.

We'll want this functionality across all Drupal.org sites for some consistency. And this would override #2228887: Always display full usernames of node and comments authors on issue pages. This is a big enough change, I'd like some more feedback from others. I'm not sure what the i18n considerations are offhand, some localities would prefer last name first.

As with anything in user profiles, we should switch from core profile module to text fields first.

If this change is generally wanted, we will want to see if realname module or updating drupalorg_crosssite_preprocess_user_picture() is better.

Full name should actually be removed, hopefully with data migration to empty first/last fields, which it predates. That migration won't be fun.

If you keep a "Display Name" field that solves the issue of localization and would also allow users who "prefer" their handle/username to choose that as their display name. Firstname and Surname are really only important for our membership. It gives us a friendly way to send folks a personalized email with "Hi Josh" (for example).

I definitely agree that we should postpone this until after we have migrated off of profile over to user fields. We will have much more flexibility then. We should know more about the timeline for that migration after DrupalCon. (Perhaps that would be a good sprint issue to tackle?)

I thought about the "Full name" field earlier and wondered if it offered a solution to the i18n issue. "Display Name" makes more sense though.

I think "Display name" makes more sense. Some people will actually want to be displayed as their user names, even though they might provide names on their profile pages.

If a user doesn't add a Display Name, then we could just use their username as a default value.

Just a thought, should we display the username somewhere as well? What if two people with the same name comment on the same thread or commit to the same project?

If we do this, the fields involved need to be migrated from profile fields to core fields before they are used more.

I'm using this issue to determine the fate of the full name field. I think we should either rename it to display name as part of migration, or drop it.

It is used quite a bit more than first/last, we have 944,107 full names, 944,107 first, and 214,573 last.

*944,107 full names, 216,217 first, and 214,573 last.

I would very much prefer we just drop it. Except for not having '-' in the url alias, there is no problem with the current situation. People who want to use their username, use it. They may or may not specify their real name on their profile. People who want to use their real name everywhere, just use it as a username.

I don't like the move towards forcing people to use their real names on the site and/or displaying those names everywhere for a number of reasons. First of all, one of the awesome things about Drupal was always the fact that it does not matter who you are or what your background is - what you do matters. There are people who would not want to display their real names because of age, gender or other reasons. They might do it with time, when they are ready. And there should not be pressure.

Secondly, usernames are part of our community. Webchick, chx, sun - while I know their names and names are on their user profiles, in the issue queues I want to see them just like that - webchick, chx, sun.

Huge part of interactions happen in IRC, where we are using nicknames as well.

Lastly, real names tend to be longer than usernames and they aren't unique. Displaying real names everywhere can add clutter, displaying both real names and usernames even more so.

What if two people with the same name comment on the same thread or commit to the same project?

Exactly.

I agree with tvn, we have no business emulating facebook.

Based on the new profile layout, we're moving closer to showing real name plus username by default. While I understand the concerns about privacy, real names are on a significant number of user profiles already, and we currently have about 80% of profiles that include something in the "Full Name" field.

I suggest we continue with the migration of the "Full Name" field, and change it to "Display Name." This will solve both use cases. Help text would be "Please enter the name that you prefer to display on your Drupal.org profile." This will cover a whole range of issues that we're discussing here.

Based on the new profile layout, we're moving closer to showing real name plus username by default.

That is only profile page layout. Names were already present there, so that's fine. Showing them everywhere else is a totally different question. We are not talking about profile page here, we are talking about name display all over the place.

While I understand the concerns about privacy, real names are on a significant number of user profiles already, and we currently have about 80% of profiles that include something in the "Full Name" field.

They include, but that info was never meant to be display name.

I suggest we continue with the migration of the "Full Name" field, and change it to "Display Name." This will solve both use cases. Help text would be "Please enter the name that you prefer to display on your Drupal.org profile." This will cover a whole range of issues that we're discussing here.

I disagree. That field was never meant to be people's display name all over the site. That's not why they filled it out. We should not suddenly make it a display name without asking anyone. Even if we were to add 'Display name' field, it should be new empty field and users need to choose what they actually want to use.

There is no range of issues here. There is only:

I just want to be able to display my full name (with capital letters and a space, like it has been for years), but I do not want a - in the alias (as it clashes with my IRC nick)

There might be other ways to fix this specific case. Fwiw http://drupal.org/u/markcarver already is already a redirect to mark-carver.

We should not suddenly make it a display name without asking anyone. Even if we were to add 'Display name' field, it should be new empty field and users need to choose what they actually want to use.

I 100% agree with this. This issue is not proposing to suddenly change what is displayed everywhere. The efforts of the user profile page re-design has very little to do with this issue.

I agree with this too.

So, the display name would be something new, not a migration from full name. Cleaning up the issue title.

I think "maintainer needs more info" is still a good status - I'd like to know if there is more demand for this.

on the "Edit Account" page, there is a field labelled "Display name". I am not sure how or where that is used. I'm only a newbie so I may be missing something but I don't seem to be able to utilize that for the posts on my site. I.e I want my users to have their "display name" displayed on their posts rather than their real name.

Does this functionality exist or not?

Cross-posting #448074-29: @ style mentions for usernames which send notifications for D.o, where the option of disallowing spaces in usernames is being discussed, just for the sake of @-style mentions:

Playing the devil's advocate. Especially because I've always found it utterly retarded that d.o is one of the few sites where you can use spaces. There's no good reason to not allow spaces in usernames. We didn't have Twitter until a handful of years ago.

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Commencing the play:

The data we enter on d.o should be entered through an assistive editor. That assistive editor would start to autocomplete if we typed "@" followed by an alphanumeric character, hence autocompleting to the full username. The assistive editor would map this to whatever form of HTML we decide on. The server-side filter to do the rendering can then be very simple again, not having to take into account spaces.