Well, as a user, I resent it when you show me
kensims Ken Sims
That’s not useful to me. However if it gets replaced by
Ken Sims
That’s more defensible as it does not duplicate information. You don’t quite know the correct @username – is it a space? dash? underscore? but that might be OK.
Clicking on their username to get the usercard would make that information known. Plus you could probably deduce quickly that @kensims is who you want for Ken Sims (in theory)
If it shows:
You know the name is "Jen Namack", not "Jenna Mack", which is somewhat useful.As a user, I resent being a second class citizen with my full name not shown just because of my username.
I for one am awful happy someone came along and fixed this I hope someone will come along and fix this with a free and open source pull request.bug faulty design with a plugin.
I think it is terribly hard to defend showing
“I_Am_User I_Am_User” on every post you ever make, it actually looks like a software bug.
But if people are insisting on messing with their users and making them think stuff is broken, so be it. Maybe someone should submit a PR for a site setting.
I am pretty opposed to this as I think you are inventing a problem here.
What if it suppressed it only when it’s an exact match?
Well technically it would be
I_Am_User I Am User
I am not opposed to having full name be the one we pick in that case, e.g. showing only
I Am User
I mean when stuff matches 100% with the exact same casing, that particular case is very hard to defend.
Though … I also find “sam Sam” to be pretty annoying.
Without my full name, if you don’t look at my profile, how do you know my full name is actually Ken Sims and not K Ensims?
As a user, I resent it that other users get their full name displayed and I don’t.
As an admin and as a programmer (not Discourse but in my $dayjob for over 35 years), I resent it that the option says “display name on posts” and “Show a user’s full name on their posts in addition to their @username.” but it doesn’t actually do that.
I guess the only solution, from an admin confusion point of view, is to add a new, default-on site setting: “Suppress full names similar to usernames”
And with that all bets are off?
“sam sam” allowed
And
“sam Sam” allowed
It’s quite terrible, I am not writing this pr, but if someone wants to, so be it
What if we only did it if there was a space, since the argument seems to be that
jamesbrown James Brown
could be
jamesbrown Jam Esbrown
This would protect you from the sam sam case.
I can weaken the suppression, but where do we stop
“sam_saffron Sam Saffron” ?
“samsaffron Sam Saffron” ?
“sam Sam” ?
“sam sam” ?
also I wonder if the hardline by @kensims and @downey here is “sam sam” must be, cause that is what the setting says.
My opinion is that byte identical is the only acceptable criterion for suppression.
My preference is that the option be available to show them even when they are byte identical.
Having an option to allow duplicates allows users of forums I manage to see the same username Full Name every single time, regardless if they are identical.
Otherwise, it’s just confusing as to what’s what.
Any buggy/duplicate “blame” falls on the person who choses to have a username and full name that match exactly… and since we require full names on our board, that’s just not going to happen here.
Just in case someone was thinking about closing my original feature request … I personally don’t consider it solved or implemented as long as it’s in a proprietary & paid plugin. 
There are two three proposals being tossed around here, it’s getting confusing.
a) No suppression of full names. Ex:
For downey / Michael Downey, show username and full name (current behavior).
For sam_saffron / Sam Saffron, show username and full name (no suppression).
For joe1234 [no fullname set], show username (joe1234)
b) Suppress all usernames when full name is present. Ex:
For downey / Michael Downey, show only full name (Michael Downey)
For sam_saffron Sam Saffron, show only full name (Sam Saffron)
For joe1234 [no fullname set], show username (joe1234)
c) Change current suppression to hide username vs fullname
For downey / Michael Downey, show username and full name (current behavior).
For sam_saffron / Sam Saffron, show only full name (Sam Saffron).
For joe1234 [no fullname set], show username (joe1234)
All three could be options, but I would really like Option B. My site is focused on real people and community building; cryptic usernames are far less useful than full names for accountability reasons. IMHO It’s OK to obscure the username. The @mention already searches on full names when provided, so that’s a non-issue. By typing @kane, I see Kane York pop up, and autocomplete will correct that to @riking.
Thanks for the recap @ky_metro
I’m all in for a) No suppression of full names.
However, that doesn’t address @sam’s point of view that in this case:
For sam / sam, show username and full name (no suppression).
would be absolutely redundant. (This is not the same as sam / Sam, which isn’t an exact match)
Personally, I don’t really care if it’s sam / sam, showing twice… that just means the user intentionally set their username as their full name.
+1 For option b). We’re also a community of real-world people based round a real-world place/resource so it doesn’t make sense to have two identities.
Option b exists, it’s a single CSS rule