Require real names to be unique

subscribing

I think limiting people's real names would be excessive; I would be pretty upset to sign up on a site and find out I can't give it my name because someone else with the same name already registered.
I would have that impersonating other users is against the site's usage policy: if it happens change (or remove) their RealName and optionally ban the user.

Anonymous users cannot impersonate registered users if you have the 'Show "Not verified" for anonymous users' option enabled.
If the user has the 'access user profiles' permission, they can hover over the real name to see the profile link in the status bar. Not immediately obvious, but one method to differentiate people.

My suggestion would be to have the option to still output the username next to the RealName (e.g. either "username (Real Name)" or "Real Name (username)") to make it more obvious.

I would still prefer focusing on detecting the impersonation behaviour myself, and creating a module that could use the RealName to assist the existing moderation processes on the site. But, I understand your scenario, particularly not wanting to display emails. I think my big concern would be handling it in a user-friendly way, in order to avoid the "wtf? that's stupid; what do I do now?" response from the user.

I would prefer a soft approach, such as a message "Someone else on the site already registered with your name. In order to avoid confusion we recommend that you add additional information to differentiate yourself". The user could then add a middle initial or such, but wouldn't be prevented from registering their initial entry (though it could require absolute uniqueness if desired). I wouldn't want to force a user to be "John Smith 2", but if the RealName was used more as just a display name, I would have no problem asking them "what about jsmith2?".

I'm not sure if this should be handled directly by RealName, since there seems like there could be so many use-cases, but perhaps a hook_realname_validate() would work well. Then one module could verify for uniqueness, another check for profanity, etc. I think a big challenge would be then providing options to the user; displaying a message is easy, but I'm not sure how you could have a "what about these options?" form with some pre-generated options (eg., when the RealName is generated from a content profile node's cck fields).

@bwinett: (and every one) If you are interested in a discussion on this topic, peruse the core issues on including a real name (or display name) in core. It was thoroughly beat to death and is the reason why this will unfortunately probably never go into core.

@gapple: I kind of like the idea of a validation hook. One of the things such a hook module could do is a hook_form_alter on the RealName settings to require the "not verified" setting, if desired. And, considering my personal experience, a profanity (and/or garbage) check is not a bad idea either. When I get a chance to work on this (no time soon, unfortunately), I may include a basic uniqueness validation module. I would probably leave a profanity check for others but would be happy to include it with this module's distribution.

Any update, on the module NancyDru? A unique name check on realname / display name would be really great!

I am still thinking about how to do this in an efficient manner, but perhaps there is no super-efficient way.

Just to ket you know, Dave is doing all the 7.x stuff right now.

This can be accomplished already with the Field Validation module. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see any reason to duplicate the functionality with custom coding in RealName:

http://drupal.org/project/field_validation

Icing on the cake would be if Clientside Validation module started using AJAX for the integration with Field Validation options that require database lookups.

http://drupal.org/project/clientside_validation