Forum OpenACS Development: username/screen_name

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Posted by Lars Pind on
We've added username to the users table, in order to allow authentication with other values than email.

(Aside: Your username can be identical to your email, and we'll provide a parameter to that effect, that will cause the default upgrade login/registration process to be equivalent to that of earlier versions on upgrade.)

Now, the question is what we should do with screen_name.

Should we

1) Keep it, so you now have both username and screen_name?

2) Keep it, but default it to username - this could be odd if your username is already defaulted to your email, but it could be useful if you let people use something a' la AOL's screen-name for username.

3) Ditch it in favor of username? This has some implications, e.g. are we going to let people change their usernames if they're not authenticated by OpenACS? Also, username is bound to the authenticating authority, so the same OpenACS system may have muliple users with the same username.

I think I prefer option 2.

Other ideas? Thoughts?

/Lars

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2: Re: username/screen_name (response to 1)
Posted by Jon Griffin on
Screen Name should probably be taken out and made into a seperate table. Users may have more than one.
See http://jongriffin.com/static/openacs/acs-person/ for some ideas (although most of this should be rolled into the core and I do have upgrade scripts for both Oracle and PG).
This was discussed before but it may have only been with Jeff D and Don. I don't remember. Anyway acs-person is deprecated.
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3: Re: username/screen_name (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Option 3 sounds like a bad idea. E.g., currently openacs.org uses screen_name as the user's IRC handle, but not as anything else. (Which is maybe a non-standard hack, but somewhat illustrative?) 1, 2, or Jon's suggestion all sound better.
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4: Re: username/screen_name (response to 1)
Posted by Jun Yamog on
Hi,

I hope we can keep it.  Since we do use screen_name.  And maybe others too use it.  We don't use it for authentication though.

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5: Re: username/screen_name (response to 1)
Posted by Frank N. on
My vote would go for option 2). Screen_name, which I tend to think of as 'Alias', does have it uses, and my hope is that some day it can be used as an option in place of the user's real name in places like the forums etc. Openness is a nice policy, yet there are situations, where it makes perfect sense to have the possibility of obscuring the identity of individuals in online forums etc.
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6: Re: username/screen_name (response to 1)
Posted by Jun Yamog on
Like Frank has said.  We use screen name to hide identity on one of our sites.
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7: Re: username/screen_name (response to 1)
Posted by Benjamin Bytheway on
I did some work on the 4.6.4 branch to add a ScreenNameP parameter switch to acs-subsite.  In addition, I defined some sql and tcl functions to allow developers to easily support and honor this switch.  I set my patches on to Roberto a while ago, but with the latest changes to registration, etc. they may have to be tweaked to be applied to HEAD.  I'm not sure exactly how they may conflict with some of the latest changes.