Continuing the discussion from Is user ID + real name redundant?:
… well, not quite. It appears that if the user ID is the same as the full name (minus the capitalization and spaces), only the user name displays.
In other words, one would see only michaeldowney next to my avatar image instead of “michaeldowney Michael Downey”. While this is indeed redundant, it makes one wonder why that person “doesn’t have a name”.
It’s also inconsistent with the user card and user profile page.
Regardless, it is by design design and intentional intentional.
Meh. I will tell that to my user who feels “not important enough to see [their] name like everyone else”. 
Consistency FTW. (IMHO anyway!)
The Seasteading Institutue is moving our forums to Discourse (go-live scheduled for 08-March-2015) and I’ve noticed the same thing. My user name is kensims and my full name is Ken Sims, and so the latter doesn’t show.
Consider this another “vote” to always show the full name (assuming that it is thusly configured), even if the full name is essentially the same as the user name.
Thanks.
Thanks for the vote, Kensi Ms! 
(Yeah, not every culture has obvious names that other cultures can intuitively split.)
That is probably the best argument for this feature.
The Seasteading Institute, while based in the U.S., has international involvement.
In fact our most active forum participant is in Colombia and English is his third language (and it shows in some of his consistent misspellings).
What if we just flipped it? So @kensims would display as this:
No, the user name should always show. (And the full name should show for every user if the configuration option to show full names is true.)
Well Ms. Kensi, at least the Real Full Name shows up in the user leaderboard. And the user profiles. And the user cards. Just not on the posts, where most people look. 
Here are some more quizzes for those who still don’t believe this is a problem:
I’ve also noticed this. The suggested changes as per @kensims @downey would be appreciated (or at least make it configurable)
Yeah … we could have the current configuration, plus an additional “Yes, I really mean it” option.
What do you think of a dirty patch:
Discourse.PosterNameComponent.prototype.sanitizeName = function(name){return name;}
placed in header template? (do I need to bind it to onLoad()?) It looks safe for me, but my forum is in production, and I’m little affraid of blowing it out.
Timing-wise, that belongs in </head>.
But you should write it like this:
Discourse.PosterNameComponent.reopen({
sanitizeName: function(name){return name;}
});
Somewhat related to this topic. I just noticed that with enable names enabled:
username= Jan_de_Bont, name= Jan de Bont shows the name with the post although it is redundant. Probably even more so than if username = jandebont with name= Jan de Bont.
What is the logic/code for deciding to show the name or not with enable names enabled?
Sounds like a bug to me.
I’m going to try this, but it’s really lame because I just went to “fix” someone’s name because it was only showing johndoe - only to find I was wasting my time because their name was set to John Doe as requested.
johndoe ≠ John Doe ≠ john_doe
and the inconsistency is maddening.
Today I faced the problem too: Discourse does not show the Real Name on a topic page then it (wrongly) assumes it is the same as the Username.
And I end up with my own plugin «Real Name»:
Not a bad idea.. if the full name and username match, show only full name.
The only trick there is your username mention is @dmitry_fedyuk not @dmitryfedyuk.
As I’ve said before, I think we need an additional configuration option.
Since the option to show the full name really means “show the full name only if the software thinks it should be shown”, we need an additional “Yes, I really mean always show the full name” option.
