BruceM, new to Discourse, asked whether using full names as usernames and business names as display names is good practice for his local business networking group. The community responded that naming conventions should reflect what works best for the specific group. Shirly_Nowak and ToddZ recommended using real names as usernames for easier recognition and tagging, while keeping professional details like company and LinkedIn in the profile. Bas noted that B2B communities typically prefer real names, while medical communities often avoid them for privacy. pfaffman suggested letting users choose usernames freely, using the name field for real names, and adding business names via a custom field for display. BruceM thanked everyone for their input, appreciating the guidance to avoid unnecessary changes while ensuring best practices. Overall, the consensus was that flexibility and community norms matter most — as itsbhanusharma put it: “Convention is what works for you and your community!”
I’ve very recently set up a Discourse group for local business professionals - a mix of online and in person networking. As they’ve joined, they’ve created user accounts using their full name as their User Name and their business name as Name. Is this naming convention ok as I don’t want to discover later that it’s actually bad practice and starts causing problems? When creating their account, I’m also encouraging people to create their profile including their company name, job title, LinkedIn URL etc.
Thanks in advance for your help. This is my first post and I’m keen to learn from this great community.
In my opinion, it’s ideal for the username to be the person’s real name, since that’s what other members will use to mention or tag them in conversations. It makes interactions feel more personal and it’s generally easier to remember and recognize people by name rather than by their company.
Using the business name and all the professional details (company, job title, LinkedIn URL, etc.) in the profile works really well, so it’s great that you’re encouraging members to fill that out. That way, people can still quickly understand what someone does and who they work with, without the username being overly “corporate”.
Overall, your approach sounds very solid, especially for a networking-focused group
Hope that helps, and good luck with the community!
Both fields username and name are meant to represent the individual user. But there’s nothing stopping you from name differently, if it’s vital that a user’s company be that prominent.
I personally share Shirly’s preference & reasoning for real names, and feel that professional info is accessible enough in profiles. But it’s your forum, and you may have your reasons.
If you do leave things the way you have them, one admin setting you probably shouldn’t change is `Prioritize username in UX’, which defaults to active:
Thanks very much Shirly. I really appreciate your help. They’re a great group of people so I don’t want them to make any changes to their details if it’s not necessary. Just want to be following good practice from the start.
It’s really dependent on the type of community you have; in the end it’s up to you
Most B2B communities I’ve seen have a convention of using “real” names. Since many of these communities will have people meet in real life, on linkedin etc.
Medical communities often explicitly forbid using real names for users, since that brings risks about identification.
B2C communities often allow a mix.
Here on Discourse Meta it’s also a mix, I have many colleagues that I truly only know by their handle. E.g. @dax is just “Dax” when we meet up in real life too even though I know her name is Daniela. Takes a while to get used to, but it works for us
Edit: I just misspelled Daniela’s name.. kinda proving the point. Sorry Dax!
What I’d be inclined to do is let people use whatever username they find appropriate, the real name in the name field, and a user_custom_field for their business name. You can configure it to display on their user profile and/or user card. That won’t show it on every post, though a theme component count conceivably add it.
But if your system is working then it’s working. You could customize text to make the labels for the name field be “business name” or similar.
