Toggling the “Use a user’s full name for username suggestions” to FALSE causes Discourse to auto-generate usernames based on the pattern “user1”, which continues to increment as new users come on board, even re-using old available items if the associated user is deleted.
This is great for privacy on sites that allow anonymous viewing, to prevent real names from being inadvertently exposed.
However, this site wide setting does not work in the case of staged users. These users are created when using a particular category to accept support-type messages via email from non-members. More or less in keeping with how plugins like the now-defunct Tickets suggest.
Even without that plugin, we’d like to use a category as a triage point for incoming messages prior to either dealing with them internally and passing them along to the forum more broadly.
But as this setting does not apply to staged users, we can’t do this since it would be exposing too much of their personal ID to the internet since Discourse creates a user name based on their name (from email headers)/.
This seems like such a consequential exception to expected behaviour that I feel like I must be missing something obvious.
Is there another setting to enforce the same anonymized username behaviour for staged users, or some other way of preventing full names in user names for staged users?