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

Collapse
2: Re: 5.1 - Screen name & anonymous posting (response to 1)
Posted by Tilmann Singer on 05/27/04 04:12 PM
username != screen name. The username field was added with the acs-authentication package to enable login without using the email address, and later on making email a non-required attribute possibly (which is not done yet). To enable it for your site you have to set the UseEmailForLoginP parameter to 0 in /admin/site-map -> acs-kernel, after that /register/ will not ask for email anymore but for the username.

The screen name is independent from that and intended to be used instead of displaying the full name whenever appropriate, but it is not implemented in many places - apparently not in forums.

I'm not sure what the ScreenNameP parameter does - I thought that was meant to be called something like SolicitScreenNameP and determines wether to ask for the screen name at all in the user profile.

Collapse
3: Re: 5.1 - Screen name & anonymous posting (response to 2)
Posted by Randy Ferrer on 05/27/04 06:05 PM

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.