The two last people who signed up on my discourse platform (self-hosted) have usernames like PoutyTurtle58 — is this a new feature or something that has always been possible and by coincidence it never happened before? Is there a setting for this?
Yes, this is actually a new feature:
Seems like a random thing to add but not necessarily bad.
Right — can usernames be changed later on? A bit weird for a bunch of francophones to end up looking like a random zoo…
Yes, they can be changed at sign up and in their user page like normal later. All this has done is given the user an option to not select a name at signup, nothing else has changed, including the ability to select your name at signup.
Depends on how you define “later.” By default, usernames can only be changed for 3 days after registration (username_change_period site setting).
You might also be interested in changing Random username nouns and Random username adjectives to change the zoo into something that matches your community.
Ok, that means I definitely need to “force” members to pick their username…
It’s probably trying to bring you to the upcoming change instead of site setting and the link is just broken. Try disabling the upcoming change and it should go away but some feedback in the thread I linked might also help.
Ah hadn’t realised it was an upcoming change, thanks! Have been off the Discourse grid for a while.
We’re about to switch the random usernames feature to default off in the next few hours, @keegan has a PR up that he will merge soon.
Note that the words used in username generation are configurable, so for a French community, you could use French words there if you would like to keep the feature.
Thanks everyone for your help with my little evening panic!
Feels like those settings should have defaults based on the locale of the forum. Locale-specific defaults for site settings (`locale_default`)