[ckan-dev] Using e-mails as usernames

[Stefan Oderbolz]

Hi,

I personally think we need usernames for various reasons:

- Users can identify themself and others better with a username than with
an e-mail address
- I don't want to expose my e-mail address to everyone (this is imho kind
of private)
- In the activity stream and basically everywhere where the username is
visible, it'll look messy when there are just e-mail addresses. Of course
you could get rid of the domain part, but then what's the difference to the
usernames we have today?


I think it would be good to enable e-mail addresses to login (sometimes I
don't remember my username, but I probably know which e-mail address I most
likely used). I even think it's a good idea as a temporary solution to
invite people, but there needs to be a username field, which should be
filled once the user activates his account.

Just my 2ct...

Regards Stefan


On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 7:33 PM, Vitor Baptista <vitor at vitorbaptista.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on a feature to add invites to users. To do so, I'm adding a
> "state" field to the user. When you invite someone, it'll create a
> "pending" user, with the name/email that you provide, and will send an
> email to the user asking him/her to activate the account.
>
> The problem is that I can't create a user without an username and a
> password. To work around this, I'll set them to random values. For the
> password, it's OK. But for the username, it's weird. Wouldn't it be nice if
> we could set the username as the e-mail, and be done with it? Why do we
> have usernames in the first place?
>
> If we didn't, then this functionality would be basically the same as the
> "Forgot Password". We would just need to change the e-mail template, so the
> user knows what we're talking about, and making sure we activate the
> account when she changes the password. We could reuse most of the code.
>
> The first step would be to accepting symbols in the username (@, +, .), so
> we can add an email there. Then we would remove the username field from the
> create user form. And, the final step would be to change the code to use
> emails wherever we're using username, and we could finally kill the column.
>
> For this card, simply allowing symbols in the usernames would be enough.
> It would be a first step in this direction.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Vítor Baptista
>
> Developer  |  http://vitorbaptista.com | LinkedIn<http://www.linkedin.com/in/vitorbaptista>|
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