Discourse dislikes my full name

Feature
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On two separate Discourse instances — one that I admin — I’ve not been able to get my full name “Lou Quillio” to display. It does, however, display here on meta.

I flipped a lotta bits trying to figure out why. enable_names, prioritize_username_in_ ux, etc. How these are set (and whether a profile even has a full name) doesn’t always behave as I’d expect, but there’s still some edge case with my particular name.

The full name on my profile displays on posts if I change it to

  • Lou
  • Lou Q
  • Lou Quill
  • Lou Quilli
  • Lou Quillio?

But in my Discourse instances, when I add that final “o” with nothing after it, my full name vanishes from posts. Makes no sense. Gotta be a bug.

Added: Could it be because my collapsed, lower-cased full name matches my username, as “Tom Jones” matches tomjones?

LQ

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Yes, we always suppress full name if it matches username exactly, because we don’t like to put repetition on the screen if we can avoid it.

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I’m not sure anybody knows how to visually parse louquillio, or other unexpected names — yet it’s a convention among some (hi!) to choose UNIX usernames this way.

I get the thinking, but the restriction seems a bit arbitrary, and it fails silently. It breaks legitimate use cases, imo.

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You could change your username to include an underscore between your first and last names.

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I could change it to anything at all, but Discourse is the only case where I have to — in order to both keep my traditional username and fulfill my policy of always using my real name.

It really shouldn’t do the suppression silently. If this behavior is documented somewhere, my considerable Google Fu didn’t find it.

But I’d settle for the behavior seen here: If the stripped, case-insensitive Full Name matches the username, display only the Full Name. That’s preferable because a user can start typing @lou and autocomplete takes over.

Which combination of name settings does Meta use to achieve

Full Name  [maybe username]  Title

The closest I’ve gotten is

username  [maybe Full Name]  Title

Thanks.

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There are site settings where admins can decide whether to prioritize name or username in discussions. So you can fix this on your own discourse instance but admins of other instances might have other preferences.

Here’s how I have them set:

54%20AM
54%20AM756×143 18.1 KB

to get:

18%20AM

My username is also suppressed, like yours, for the reason explained by Jeff above. I like it, and in fact on my instance we have a real name policy and nearly all staff appear like this because their username and name are the same.

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Thanks for sharing that combination of settings. Somehow I hadn’t tried it exactly that way — probably because I was trying to reckon the suppression of Full Name at the same time.

Obviously this is working as intended from Discourse’s perspective. I’d say the only bug is that the name suppression happens with no explanation.

Thanks again.

1 Like