Offering blank username suggestions rather than ‘UserN’ at signup

[JammyDodger]

Pulling this out into a separate topic as this is proving to be a significant bugbear on a site I’m involved with:

@lindsey

When use email for username and name suggestions is disabled, we could leave the username field blank at signup instead of suggesting userN — we’ve done something similar in our admin account signups on new Discourse sites.

@ToddZ

I would much prefer that, myself. I’d rather see people mash the keyboard and come up with a nonsense username (or hook into a username generator API) than end up with a bunch of userN.

I can’t quite imagine a reason to prefer userN, but if I’m missing something, maybe an optional setting could make everyone happy.

I think leaving it blank would be a much smoother signup experience as no one wants a forum populated by indistinct usernames (@user763, @user764, @user765), so the suggestions are rarely (if ever) helpful.

[brenna12 (Brenna)]

This would be a good solution for my community too, the username field auto-populates with an available username (in UserXYZ style). Although this field is editable, and I have added some custom text to make new users aware of this, we are still getting a lot of new users with default usernames

Would be very happy to see this introduced!