Mandatory username & avatar generation - How can we do this?

We would like to keep users from sharing any private information. How can we limit users to specific usernames and avatars, or create an avatar & username using a generation tool with select words (ex: animals, fruits, colors, etc.) that may be used as usernames?

Basically, we want to stop users from being able to upload photos of themselves & stop them from using their real name as a username… But, we’d still like to make it semi-personalized & fun. Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated - Thanks!

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I think your best bet would be to use an external authentication system that enforced whatever rules you want and use DiscourseConnect - Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse (sso) to connect to it.

I guess you could make a plugin that somehow limited what usernames could require certain things only. It’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t be frustrating, like a “here are our bizarre password rules, good luck following them” system. But maybe if it was just fruits and numbers it’d be OK? Maybe the plugin could use the suggester to suggest names that it liked somehow. Sounds like a couple days work after you’d figured out the code to implement it.

edit: Well, maybe it’s easier than I thought. It looks like the username suggester has stuff built in to make that somewhat easier, though I can’t quite make sense of it in 4 minutes.

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For the limited selection of avatars, there is the selectable avatars feature

With the generated usernames, yeah that would require a custom plugin, I think.
I guess it’s not so uncommon e.g. a music app, Auxy, has generated names for projects

A coding app for kids that I used has this feature, as well, for usernames (they also had an adjective followed by a noun, but was much broader than just animals)

In terms of scope, maybe it could start with a two word system. And you could add separate vocabulary sets for the first word and second word, through admin settings (so that the lists can be updated and edited more easily).

Maybe users could click to randomise with a new combo each time, not sure how you might want it from there

(If you would like for someone to build a custom plug-in, usually jobs like that can be posted in the marketplace if you have a budget)

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Thanks! Is it possible for the usernames to be the same as their login for our website?

That is similar to one idea we had, like select a word from one list, select a word from a 2nd list, then combine to create a unique username.

Yeah, I think the link that pfaffman posted here should have more information on how to do that (if you have an existing website):

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