"Use name for username suggestions": no effect on signup form?

Contribute Bug
1

Trying to help out in Customize registration form / hide or normalize username field - Support, I found that the Site Setting use_name_for_username_suggestions doesn’t seem to have any effect on my local signup form.

Tested on self-hosted 2026.3.0-latest.1 (41f62aab8e).

AskBot believes it definitely should work for SSO / OAuth2 account creation, but it can’t solidly confirm that it should function as an auto-suggest on the regular signup form.

I’m wondering if I have the wrong expectation for this setting – or if I’m right and a bug has been introduced somewhere, possibly in the fixes for topics like Offering blank username suggestions rather than ‘UserN’ at signup or “use email for username and name suggestions”.

Can anyone confirm whether this setting does something on your local signup form?

AskBot's explanation:

Based on what I was able to verify, use_name_for_username_suggestions is definitely used in external-auth account creation flows such as SSO / OAuth2 / DiscourseConnect. The setting context shows Discourse includes the user’s name as an input when resolving a suggested username in those paths:

  • /lib/auth/result.rb
  • /app/models/discourse_connect.rb

I also found evidence that Discourse has username autocomplete/suggestion behavior in the normal signup form, so this feature does not appear to be SSO-only in concept. However, I could not find a current Meta source that conclusively proves the plain local signup form is wired to this specific site setting in all cases.

So the safest summary is:

  • Confirmed: use_name_for_username_suggestions affects SSO / OAuth2 / external auth username suggestion.
  • Likely intended: it also affects the standard local signup form username suggestion/autocomplete behavior.
  • Not conclusively verified from Meta sources alone: whether the current local signup form always uses this exact setting.
1 Like
Customize registration form / hide or normalize username field
2

Confirmed this setting as no effect on my instance either

3

I’m moving this to bug. The setting is activated on try.discourse.org and there are no social logins or SSO options.

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Nothing is being suggested when I attempt to sign up.

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1 Like
4

That setting only works for SSO/OAuth flows because

  1. in those flows, the email is the “source of truth” and the only required information coming from the “login provider”
  2. in the local login form, the name is usually at the bottom (cf. screenshot in @hawk’s post above)

I’ve updated the site setting’s description to hopefully make it clearer

2 Likes
5

Thanks all. Sounding more like a feature request than a bug…. basically I dont have SSO but I want the same name–>username priority - real names should drive usernames - ideally the user should not need to manually fill it out

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Thanks for the attention, Hawk & zogstrip. Appreciate the clarification.

I agree that if this feature did work in the local login form, the UX would be awkward because of the standard field order.

Would an option to enable it + alter the field order be a big lift?

Just wondering if one would better post a request in Contribute > Feature or commission a plugin in Marketplace.

1 Like
7

That won’t help for a forum hosted by Discourse like @Jesse_Starks’. While he said he might choose a higher plan in the future, I doubt he was referring to enterprise, which would be needed for custom plugins.

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8

Ah, thanks. I should refresh myself on the Discourse plans. I have self-hosted-brain.

1 Like