Forum OpenACS Q&A: 5.1 - Screen name & anonymous posting

I just set-up an instance of 5.1 on my dev server and so far it is really quite an upgrade from 4.6.3. 😊 I apologize for the following post if these questions have been answered on other posts, but after spending an hour on Google, I just haven't found anything referencing these issues. I'm not sure I understand the following two areas:

1 - After installing the site, I noticed that the username field that I filled out during initial registration did not show up under the screen name field in the user profile. No problems, I went ahead and entered a screen name. Then I set the ScreenNameP parameter to 1 in acs-subsite - main.

I assumed that doing this might cause two possible behaviors. The first is that the screen name should show in all postings etc. including the welcome message shown on the header. The system should show a screen name rather than the user name anywhere where the the user name would normally be shown.

The second thing I would expect to happen is that logins are enabled via username rather than email address. So far, as far as I can tell, setting the parameter does absolutely nothing. Is there something else that needs to be done and are my assumptions re the behavior from switching this on correct?

2 - I would like to enable anonymous posting for the Weblogger. I followed the advice I found on a couple of post and gave The Public create permissions on the blog which allows the viewer to enter the comment without first getting thrown into registration, upfront, it simply sends the viewer there after confirming the post which does not allow the post unless you log in. I tried granting other permissions instead but nothing worked.

Finally, I noticed that "out-of-the-box" the weblogger shows the Actions section to anyone, just the add entry and draft entries links. Shouldn't this be shown only to admins?

Thanks for any assistance anyone can provide with these issues.

Ok, I see where I was confused. I turned on the UseEmailForLoginP parameter and now as you mention, it asks for the username for login - great. I missed that parameter as I was perusing the acs-kernel params. 😟

Isn't the screen name redundant, as well as confusing for the typical user? I'm thinking of the typical visitor to a site. You register and you get asked for a username and then for a screen name. It's not bad enough that the user has to find one unique user name, but two. ??? Is there a reason why this was implemented like this?

As far as the ScreenNameP parameter - it reads "Set this to 1 if you want to show screen names instead of real names." Seems clear, but it's not working. It seems trivial to implement this though I would prefer to have to deal with only one username and do away with the screen name field or vice versa. Some standard way of dealing with this should be agreed upon so that future code upgrades are easier to deal with. 😊

As far as SolicitScreenNameP - there is a param in acs-kernel called ScreenName which you set to none, solicit or require and it behaves accordingly.

Thanks a million for the input Tilmann, I appreciate the assist. I totally missed the UseEmailForLoginP param when I looked through the acs-kernel params.