# Full name @mentions

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** mentions
**Created:** [11 בינואר,‏ 2015,‏ 9:56pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896 "2015-01-11T21:56:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3

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### Author: ![sam](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/sam/32/102149_2.png) [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [25 בספטמבר,‏ 2017,‏ 5:28am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/42 "2017-09-25T05:28:03Z")

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I am not against experimenting with adding a tiny avatar, but I would like to see the experiment in a plugin first. It is pretty straightforward to add.

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### Author: ![MakaryGo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/makarygo/32/187426_2.png) [@MakaryGo](https://meta.discourse.org/u/MakaryGo)
#### Post date: [29 בספטמבר,‏ 2017,‏ 1:34pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/43 "2017-09-29T13:34:52Z")

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I agree that option (perhaps as global setting) to display mention as @sam OR as `Sam Saffron` would be really great.  
With the same formatting as mentions now have, but displaying full name instead of `@handle`

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### Author: ![Cozdabuch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/cozdabuch/32/139120_2.png) [@Cozdabuch](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Cozdabuch)
#### Post date: [7 בינואר,‏ 2018,‏ 6:21am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/44 "2018-01-07T06:21:03Z")

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@codinghorror @sam

So, you guys allow for SSO logins, presumably to allow for companies, anong other entities who maintain master employee/user lists to login with ease.

The issue I’m running into here is this. We have 4500 employees. Most don’t know each other. While tagging by typing name in works perfectly fine, the username displayed is a 5 digit employee #. So now all people see is comeone tagging a 5 digit #

Can you guys write/enable a user option that simply displays the Full Name field in lieu of @username please!

You allow a user option to select the Full Name displayed first in a thread reply with username to the right. A simple visual switch.

I totally get the purpose of using a “twitter” tagging model, but it is severely aggravating for large professional/educational institutions to use. Please, please make an option available. In any means.

It’s not even in a paid hosted/supported version, so you’re missing out there on revenue for large organizations who might otherwise use this.

In my case, I’m trying to “sell” it to my board to adopt discourse. I’m sure they won’t like this missing capibility

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### Author: ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [7 בינואר,‏ 2018,‏ 11:11am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/45 "2018-01-07T11:11:58Z")

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Who decided the username had to be a 5 digit number? That’s a bad decision.

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### Author: ![mikechristopher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mikechristopher/32/89135_2.png) [@mikechristopher](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mikechristopher)
#### Post date: [7 בינואר,‏ 2018,‏ 12:24pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/46 "2018-01-07T12:24:12Z")

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It’s quite common from what I have seen in larger organisations to have their AD logon use their payroll or ID number in order to logon rather than names. Not necessarily 5 numbers however. For example my last organisation my login was B3293016 - would be difficult to distinguish who that is if they then used SSO to check against that login and use it for discourse username and mentions.

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### Author: ![Cozdabuch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/cozdabuch/32/139120_2.png) [@Cozdabuch](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Cozdabuch)
#### Post date: [7 בינואר,‏ 2018,‏ 2:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/47 "2018-01-07T14:55:25Z")

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What @mikechristopher said. The 5 did fit # is our employee I’d. Technically it’s 6, but the zero at the beginning is left off as we haven’t reached numbers greater than 100,000.

Bottom line, again having the feature I described will give corporate/enterprise clients a lot better usability.

Had you not integrated SSO, I’d understand being reluctant to allow full name tags vs username. But you made SSO available, this is a logical next step enhancement

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### Author: ![sam](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/sam/32/102149_2.png) [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [7 בינואר,‏ 2018,‏ 11:35pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/48 "2018-01-07T23:35:09Z")

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I am not against adding this kind of option, but at the moment none of our paying customers need it so I cannot prioritize it.

I would probably recommend building this as a plugin first, this is something I would consider building if an enterprise customer funded it.

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### Author: ![Cozdabuch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/cozdabuch/32/139120_2.png) [@Cozdabuch](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Cozdabuch)
#### Post date: [6 בפברואר,‏ 2018,‏ 3:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/49 "2018-02-06T03:34:08Z")

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@mcwumbly have you had any luck with the CSS route?

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![mcwumbly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mcwumbly/32/103861_2.png) [@mcwumbly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcwumbly)
#### Post date: [6 בפברואר,‏ 2018,‏ 3:57am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/50 "2018-02-06T03:57:46Z")

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Haven’t tried it, sorry. Just threw out the idea, but this isn’t something I’ve felt the need to explore too deeply personally.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![tarek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tarek/32/124831_2.png) [@tarek](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tarek)
#### Post date: [16 בנובמבר,‏ 2018,‏ 12:32pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/51 "2018-11-16T12:32:29Z")

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> [@cpradio](#):
>
> If you did the Autocomplete route, could you simply put it in parenthesizes after the mention, @cpradio (Full name)? or would you want it clickable?

Just to beat this dead horse a bit more, one of the barriers we’re having in our group is that people get super easily confused by the usernames. So right now, they have no problems making mentions, but when reading, they often don’t know who the mentioned person is. As such, in our use case, `@cpradio (Jim Smith)` would be ideal. The user would type in the @mention (let’s say `@cpradio`) and it automatically turns into `@cpradio (Jim Smith)` for others to read.

This would be just like the username mentions by each of our posts.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![jessicah](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jessicah/32/102653_2.png) [@jessicah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jessicah)
#### Post date: [26 באוגוסט,‏ 2019,‏ 9:12pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/52 "2019-08-26T21:12:32Z")

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Has there been any movement here? It’s annoying to have to click on a username to figure out who the actual person is. And trying to move from Facebook Groups to Discourse is a pain when don’t get to see full names by default. I don’t think uniqueness is really the problem that people think it is from reading previous comments, as, once again, you can use usercards to differentiate if that’s the case. I’ve already changed the site settings to prioritize full names in UX…

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![nachof](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/nachof/32/156881_2.png) [@nachof](https://meta.discourse.org/u/nachof)
#### Post date: [21 בספטמבר,‏ 2019,‏ 12:21pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/53 "2019-09-21T12:21:55Z")

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I made a quick script that does this. I put it in a component, in the \</head\> section, and it works. It could definitely be improved upon, but here it is.

```
<script type="text/discourse-plugin" version="0.1">
    var decorateAtMentions = function($post) {
        $post.find("a.mention").each(function() {
            var $elem = $(this);
            var username = $elem.text().substr(1);
            
            var data = Discourse.User.findByUsername(username).then(function(user) {
                var avatarurl = user.avatar_template.replace("{size}", 18);
                var realname = user.name;
                $elem.before("<img src='"+avatarurl+"' title='"+realname+"'>");
                $elem.attr("title", realname);
                $elem.after("["+realname+"]");
            });
        })
    }
    api.decorateCooked(decorateAtMentions, {id: 'decorate-at-mentions'});
</script>

```

The title in the img tag is a potential problem if a name has a single quote character, so it needs to be done “the right way” (myself, I’ll probably remove it since I don’t really like it that much).

I wanted to _change_ the link text, instead of appending the real name at the end, but unfortunately that breaks the click handler for the user card (since it apparently relies on the mention text to load the name) and I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![jessicah](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jessicah/32/102653_2.png) [@jessicah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jessicah)
#### Post date: [25 באוקטובר,‏ 2019,‏ 8:59am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/54 "2019-10-25T08:59:11Z")

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That sounds great. For a novice, do you have a step-by-step guide on how to actually add that to my discourse instance? 🙂

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![dax](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/dax/32/244677_2.png) [@dax](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dax)
#### Post date: [25 באוקטובר,‏ 2019,‏ 9:31am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/55 "2019-10-25T09:31:23Z")

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There is already a guide, please read

> [@Beginner's guide to using Discourse Themes](https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-using-discourse-themes/91966#heading--2-3):
>
> This is a crash course in Discourse theme basics. The target audience is everyone who is not familiar with Discourse themes. If you’ve already used Discourse theme / theme components, this guide is probably not something you need to read. What are themes and theme components? A theme or theme component is a set of files packaged together designed to either modify Discourse visually or to add new features. Let’s start with themes. Themes In general, themes are not supposed to be compatible …

and create your first theme component.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![jessicah](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jessicah/32/102653_2.png) [@jessicah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jessicah)
#### Post date: [25 באוקטובר,‏ 2019,‏ 11:30pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/56 "2019-10-25T23:30:42Z")

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@nachof I found a way to make it work: [Use fullnames for mentions · GitHub](https://gist.github.com/jessicah/cd580bab64d89875a157579789b03511) by overriding `_show()` in `component:user-card-contents`. I’m guessing the leading underscore means we probably shouldn’t override it? But it seems to work:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/6/4/64b0e24d0ccb4c2ad5d93b18d1da18ab22a37949.png)

Perhaps there needs to be an entry point to optionally get the username from `$target`? Anyway, this was really a blocker from my POV to deploying to my wider community. Time to roll ahead 😃

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![debryc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/debryc/32/101652_2.png) [@debryc](https://meta.discourse.org/u/debryc)
#### Post date: [30 ביולי,‏ 2021,‏ 4:05pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/57 "2021-07-30T16:05:41Z")

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> [@jessicah](#):
>
> I found a way to make it work: [Use fullnames for mentions · GitHub](https://gist.github.com/jessicah/cd580bab64d89875a157579789b03511)

This is amazing! I’m not a software developer so I couldn’t figure out how to add what you created to my Discourse site. I tried using this url to install via git repository but it asked if I was sure this was a Discourse theme. What steps should I be taking?

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [30 ביולי,‏ 2021,‏ 4:08pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/58 "2021-07-30T16:08:32Z")

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You would create a new theme component from the UX and paste that stuff into the `head tag` part of the theme.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![OverseersMight](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/overseersmight/32/228719_2.png) [@OverseersMight](https://meta.discourse.org/u/OverseersMight)
#### Post date: [22 באוגוסט,‏ 2021,‏ 3:02pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/59 "2021-08-22T15:02:54Z")

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Sorry for beating the dead horse for the 100th time, but I installed it correctly and it will not display the user cards, any fix for this since this was 2 years ago?  
I know there is a fairly low chance that you’ll go through the work reprogramming it, but maybe some nice community member will help this out.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![debryc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/debryc/32/101652_2.png) [@debryc](https://meta.discourse.org/u/debryc)
#### Post date: [23 באוגוסט,‏ 2021,‏ 6:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/60 "2021-08-23T18:20:58Z")

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> [@pfaffman](#):
>
> You would create a new theme component from the UX and paste that stuff into the `head tag` part of the theme.

I’m honestly still pretty lost with these directions. Your help on [What makes a successful volunteer Discourse sysadmin?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-makes-a-successful-volunteer-discourse-sysadmin/189957) is super helpful, but I haven’t found that volunteer yet.

In the meantime, @jessicah , are you still around to maybe make this a theme component that is published in #Customization > Theme component ? Or is someone else able to make a working theme component?

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Don](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/don/32/228726_2.png) [@Don](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Don)
#### Post date: [28 בינואר,‏ 2022,‏ 9:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/full-name-mentions/23896/61 "2022-01-28T21:17:11Z")

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Hi @debryc and @OverseersMight ,  
If you are still interested 🙂

> [@Discourse Show Fullname in Mentions](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-show-fullname-in-mentions/216319):
>
> eyeglassesPreview [https://theme-creator.discourse.org/theme/megothss/discourse-show-name-mentions](https://theme-creator.discourse.org/theme/megothss/discourse-show-name-mentions)hammer_and_wrenchRepository [GitHub - megothss/discourse-show-name-mentions: A discourse theme component to display the full name instead of usernames in @mentions](https://github.com/megothss/discourse-show-name-mentions)questionInstall Guide [How to install a theme or theme component](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-do-i-install-a-theme-or-theme-component/63682)open_bookNew to Discourse Themes? [Beginner’s guide to using Discourse Themes](https://meta.discourse.org/t/beginners-guide-to-using-discourse-themes/91966) Install this theme component A theme component to display the f…

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