[OWW-SC] usernames

[Austin Che]

"Jason Kelly" <jasonk at MIT.EDU> mumbled mindlessly:

> Yeah, I think one good point is that we're not looking for anonymity
> here, so it would be great to have a system where as soon as someone
> signed up you would know their full name . (unlike current system
> where they need to fill in their userpage).

    I still don't understand what's wrong with putting that info in
    the user name in the first place.
    
> I'd happily adopt the facebook model -- e.g. log in with email
> address, but you can search people by real names and use schools for
> disambiguation.  I think most people could remember which email
> address they signed in with -- it seems to work fine for facebook, I
> think the 10 different email phenomenon may be specific to you austin
> :)  Trouble here is that it would need some coding to implement this.

    It would actually need lots of coding if you want to toss out the
    user system. What link would it create when you signed something?
    What would a user's page be? MediaWiki is inherently user based
    and requires users to have user pages. An alternative would be to
    assign random strings to users i.e. User:x214g90kueatn but they
    log in with their email. But to me, this is much more confusing
    than logging in with their name.
    
> While we could require people to have username FirstLast with the
> existing system, I'm a little hesitant because although we may not
> have name conflicts now we should expect to have them in the future.
> If we are going to implement a new login system, I'd like to go with
> something that can scale as the site grows -- and I think FirstLast
> only works for the first JasonKelly.  Unless people can think of a
> clever way to deal with poor JasonKelly2.

    The point is that we don't have to implement anything new at all
    to get something which improves on the current situation. Someone
    could currently create an account called JasonKelly. Would you get
    upset? Would it confuse people? Who gets the right to the page
    "Jason Kelly"? What if their favorite username is jasonk and now
    they are stuck with jasonk2? It's not like those issues don't
    already exist. So I can't think of any reason to not move people
    to use more descriptive user names where ever possible as it
    requires absolutely no change in technology.
    
-- 
Austin Che           <austin at csail.mit.edu>          (617)253-5899