Reserved usernames wildcard

Hmm I did a search on Google and the forum before asking this, but I can’t find it –

Moderators have a prefix before their name. So i42-StaffName. For reserved usernames, can I type i42-* to block all instances of this prefix? Will this work? If not, any alternatives?

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I don’t think the username block list supports this at the moment, but it might be a nice improvement for the future.

I believe @riking originally worked on this?

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Hmm, yeah, I didn’t actually consider that. I assumed that everyone would use primary-group styling and custom titles to mark organization members.

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We use it for consistency, mostly, with other sites like Reddit

I was looking for a feature like this as well. Resorted to using a badge as a title to denote our key staff members.

Title is the best and proper way to do this unless you have external username requirements as @dylanh724 does.

Won’t turning new members require approval sort this? You can deny members from using a prohibited username.

Yes – I’d manually add new members, or temporarily turn it off for 5 minutes, whatever is easiest

I would still like wildcards in the reserved username list, to stop people from using our company name within their username and possibly being mistaken for staff. It sounds like a code contribution from us to add this feature might be accepted.

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For staff you should absolutely look at using titles and possibly a “primary group” based styling.

Is there any doubt here who is the “official” twitter voice?

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We do have a staff group, so our actual staff get the title CHOICE staff member.
But still many users sign up with usernames like John-CHOICE which to an uneducated eye looks like a staff member. I’m guessing that they don’t intend to mislead, but it would be much easier if this was prevented at the signup stage so I don’t have to go around to them one by one and either ask them to change it or just change it for them which could irk.

So to take your Twitter example: it’s not possible for me to sign up with the username vivekatwitter or adminviveka or even vivekatwttr.

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Just wondering if I can re-light this topic…

I’m guessing the wildcard support isn’t currently included?

We did have a member the other day register with the word Admin is his username, it got spotted and we contacted him to let him know it had been modified and explained why. The feeling was that it would, in his case, have been quite easy to have had someone use the @ tagging and send something to him instead of us…

Could someone confirm that currently there is no wildcard support for reserved username (e.g. *admin or admin*) and that there isn’t/are plans to add it.

Thanks in advance for your time and clarity :slight_smile:

Kind regards

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I give a big +1 for this feature

Hello,

I have already submitted a pull request on GitHub that implements this feature.

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Just out of interest, as I’m not familiar with how exactly Discourse gets update, does this mean this change is “in”, or that its there for “consideration” etc?

Any further info appreciated.

Once someone has made a pull request it then goes to the team to review and check all is ok with the code that has been written. They can then go back and forth if they want any changes made etc before they merge it.

With regards to this one in particular this has now been merged into master after some changes had been made. Therefore it now depends on which releases your forum updates to - with regards to when you will get it on your forum.

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Hi @mikechristopher, thanks for the response, really appreciate the detailed info.

Looking forward to seeing this one released :slight_smile:

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Well, yea, it’s easy to see the difference between staff when staff responds in a post right above. Will staff responses be right beside every single reply in every single post on every single page of a giant forum? If there’s Discourse-Sam with no Staff title next to SomeGuy also with no title, perhaps people that don’t know the Discourse architecture may assume the Discourse-Sam guy is an official staff.