Synopsis of the problem
If a community requests the full name of its users at registration, by setting /admin/settings/users/ “full name required” ON,
… but, for privacy reasons, does not expose the Full Name to the community (so /admin/setting/users/ “enable names” is OFF),
… then the Full Name cannot be accessed by anyone, even an admin.
Request
When the FullName is required (/admin/settings/users/ “full name required” ON) but is not exposed to the community for privacy reasons ( /admin/setting/users/ “enable names” OFF),
→ we would like the full name to be viewable by an admin on the user admin page, where the “name” is displayed.
Discussion
Our community uses Discourse as both a forum and a workflow engine. We require Full Names to verify that our users are legit, but, for privacy reasons, we do not expose these Full Names to the community. As a result (see above) our admins cannot see the users’ Full Names.
It makes no sense to us because, if even our admins can’t see it, for what reason would anyone want the Full Name on?
So we have a polling process in the background, polling registration data every 10 minutes and posting it to a location the admins can see.
We believe that this does not conform to the implicit expectations that everyone shares (or at least, that we have) of forum behavior:
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we feel that there is an implicit expectation that admins can see everything
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we feel that, in this same implicit understanding, mods, and certainly group owners and others, should not see everything and are on a need-to-know basis.
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therefore, we feel that, when the Full Name is required but not exposed to the community, the admins should still see and have access to it, in the user admin page, where the “name” field is displayed.
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we do not consider that the Full Name should be displayed in other locations or to other roles if /admin/setting/users/ “enable names” is OFF
