Users do not specifically determine what is shown, this will be determined by your site settings in different places.
User cards & profiles
The three elements to juggle are:
-
Full name
This is the ‘real name’ and you can make it required or not. If you are worried about privacy, then you might not ask for it. Alternatively, you could collect it but hide it by unchecking theenable namesoption -
Username
This is required for Discourse to operate -
Priority
You can de-emphasise names by prioritising usernames, or you can turn this off to focus on the real name
Another useful option is to disable user cards and profiles for anonymous users. In combination with the security below, only logged-in users will see more personal data
Posts
If the data exists and is available, you can enable this setting for posts (or not enable it for privacy)
One thing to bear in mind, is that when the username and the real name are the ‘same’ (ignoring spaces), the second element will be hidden to avoid duplication, so for example:
My username robmc is different from my full name
… while my colleague’s matches
