# Usernames on top, lifting username length restrictions

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/usernames-on-top-lifting-username-length-restrictions/14747>\
**Category:** Feature\
**Tags:** completed\
**Created:** [Avril 14, 2014, 3:30 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/usernames-on-top-lifting-username-length-restrictions/14747 "2014-04-14T03:30:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

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**Author:** ![codinghorror](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/codinghorror/32/110067_2.png) [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)\
**Post date:** [Avril 30, 2014, 8:18 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/usernames-on-top-lifting-username-length-restrictions/14747/10 "2014-04-30T20:18:20Z")

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Let me explain why, after seeing usernames-on-top for the first time at Hummingbird, over time I came to believe that this is a superior layout.

- Name length has been a _huge_ problem for us from the beginning. Even with 15 char max usernames, the same as Twitter, we can barely fit long/wide usernames in the left gutter. @sam came up with arcane splitting heuristics to get names to be on two lines that helped, but seemed awfully hacky.

- The bigger you make the left gutter, the less room there is for everything else. And other than badges, which will be glyphs or images, there is nothing _useful_ to put in the left gutter. So other than a little flourish at the top with the avatar and 1 or 2 lines of text, the left gutter is empty space the rest of the time. Some whitespace is good, sure, but a giant set of whitespace to accommodate the rare ultra-wide username MMMMMAXIMUM is not helping anyone.

- Choosing and showing titles for some users exacerbates the problem (a little).

- Enabling the optional display of long names for each user exacerbates the problem _a lot_.

- Choosing intentionally short usernames (15 char max) like Twitter began to feel like a long term mistake I did not want cast in stone for V1. Sure, you want somewhat short unique names so the typing and display of them doesn’t get unwieldy, but 15 chars gets a lot of pushback from communities because it is so short. I think something like 20 chars is much more realistic – and there’s _NO_ way we could do that with the left gutter name approach. We can barely get 15 chars to work!

- It’s even worse on expanded replies and in-reply-to since the width is even narrower there!

- Trying the username-on-top layout on folksy felt very, very good and natural. I was surprised how much I liked the flow with the username on top. Maybe because that’s how Twitter does it, and a bunch of other chat clients I use?

![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/2X/5/5e3146e5ebf52df42ed9c0e19d7dac07fa80c14d.png)

 ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/2X/5/55ca51e7f81d3fe8c6e727374b3c404faa7d31f9.png) 

The more I think about it, the more I believe that there is just no question that username-on-top is the correct long term model for Discourse. It solves so, so many problems we had.

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