Oh man, I’m so happy you guys decided to do this.
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Yep Hummingbird was one of the inspirations for this. I like to observe what multiple communities do and try to fold that into the product as we go.
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Just wanted to stop in and say I’m glad Discourse finally went this route with the usernames. Looks a lot better than it used to.
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Max username length has now officially been bumped from 15 to 20:
MyLongUsername
MyEvenLongerUsername
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At first the username-on-top felt weird to me, but now that I’m used to it, it feels very right. As for the Username + Full Name (+ Title) on the other hand, this still feels wrong.
Three different shades of grey, plus an icon? That’s too much. And yes it’s only “VIPs”, but there’s usually at least one VIP in every thread.
First thing I would recommend is to let users choose their display name, same way authors can do it on WordPress:
- Username
- Full Name
- First Name
Except you wouldn’t make “Username + Full/First Name” an option.
Basically what you’d be doing by making this decision is that you choose whichever name you’d prefer the majority of people to call you by. Maybe I’ve grown accustomed to signing up as “hotwheels89” on every website, but actually I prefer people call me “Bob” these days, so that’s what I’d like to have displayed up there. Anyone who needs to know my username or full name can just click on my avatar.
Thanks to the solid @mention autocomplete this would work fine.
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I disagree, I think it works great.
I believe one workaround is to edit your full name to make it equal to your username. I think we suppress the full name in this case since it would be presenting duplicate information.
Why not give admins the option of what to display and the sequence, just like the action buttons at the bottom of the post?
Our community uses real names so we’re used to scanning content, searching, @-mentioning, etc., by real name. So we’d definitely have the sequence switched around.
I know one item on @sam’s backlog is to make fullname more configurably prominent at the top of the post. Basically to re-order this
username fullname title
to
fullname username title
etc
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I think this might be effectively to-done now @sam given we support unicode, allow username length as a site setting, have all the “prioritize full name” stuff in place, etc?
This one is Ok to keep for the history of Discourse, I think. 
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