[eborg9]

I never thought this would be such an issue, but why can’t you have people use their real names?

You can’t put your real name in the “Username” field because it won’t let you write normally with capitol letters and spaces.
The real names in the profile field don’t show up throughout the site so users can’t search for each other unless they just happen to know the other person’s username.

So the members directory is just a list of anonymous usernames, not a real list of community members.
If Buddypress is indeed good for communities, sports teams, and the like, then why create it for people to hide from each other?

Is it possible to have a community of real people with real names using Buddypress?
Seems like a no brainier…any successful community online is driven by people being able to find each other, not a list of usernames a la Facebook, Linked IN.

After all of the work and development on this program, didn’t it ever occur to anyone that someone may want to really use it as a real community site, with real people that have real names?

Can Buddypress be used with Real Names?

[r-a-y]

A default install will allow users to enter their “Name”.
eg. http://testbp.org/accounts/

It’s supposed to show your “Name” across the site by default… excluding the @mention names, where in particular are you seeing usernames ?

[eborg9]

Where?
Everywhere. Across the whole site members are referred to by their username. You can only see their real name if you open their profile.
So everywhere where there is activity from that user, it refers to them by the username. It doesn’t say “John smith” just made a new post, it says “adfas9343 just made a new post”…seriously what good does that do anyone?

That’s great on a forum, but not for a community with real people that have names.
How do people find each other if it’s all usernames?
How are you promoting yourself if your activities and blog posts are hidden by a name that no one will recognize you by?
How can you have a community site for an organization if the people don’t know who is a member and who isn’t?

It seems that real names would be the default and usernames would be the option for a community site, not the other way around.
Can you imagine Facebook or Linked In if it were all usernames?

[r-a-y]

Not true! Take a look at testbp.org and on bp.org.
Every name in the activity stream is using the display name.

eg. https://buddypress.org/community/members/DJPaul/ – Take a look at Paul’s activity stream. What name is displayed in the activity stream?

In fact, some people wanted it the other way around (using usernames instead of display names)!
Do you have the BP Usernames Only plugin installed? If so, disable it.

[eborg9]

No I don’t have that installed ( never even heard of it).
Yes, I know that if you view the individual users profile, you wiil see their real name, but throughout the rest of the site, they are referred to by their user name.
They are listed by their username. They are referred to in the activity stream by their username.
When you click on to see the members directory, you don’t see real people, you see usernames.
https://buddypress.org/community/members/

[dre1080]

@r-a-y, @eborg9 is right, this is happening with me too, in the activity stream it always shows the username but in the rest of the site it shows the display name

[r-a-y]

@dre1080, @eborg9

If you view the members directory, you’ll view people with display names:
http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/5892/20100522200509.jpg

I can’t duplicate what you guys are experiencing.

[eborg9]

How is it possible? You can’t use caps or spaces when creating a username and Buddypress uses usernames..so how can I let me people use their real names. No usernames anywhere. I don’t want them to show anywhere on the site, only for log in purposes.

It’s over complicated. why not just use your name, however you want to write it? If you decide that you want to put a username in the name field then so be it, but why have so many different name options…username, real name, display name…I mean c’mon.

All I want is that when you go to the directory you see people’s real names. when you view the activity stream, you see peoples real names. No user names. Just plain old first and last name that they put in their profile info.

If someone registers and their name is “John Smith” I would like him to be referred to all over the site and listed as “John smith”. When you go to the Directory, I would like his name to be seen, “John Smith” not his username.
How do I make that happen?

[peterverkooijen]

It is a conscious design decision by Andy Peatling not to support full names as “Firstname Lastname” or synchronize the various names fields, because it would run into international cultural sensitivities – or something like that…

I have added lots of custom workaround code in my sites to fix this mess and had posted my solutions on this forum somewhere, but they have since been removed.

[eborg9]

I’m not going to insult the decision to code it that way, and I love the software and appreciate the work, but a community of usernames works great for forums, Developers, and game geeks, but organizations of regular people, search directories for their colleagues names, not their WOW monikers.

Anyone that is blogging as a marketing tool, wants their real name, or company name associated with their blog and activities.
Usernames are for web people. Real People use real names.

If we are to apply Buddypress for real communities and organizations, then usernames is a bit juvenile and in many instances, unprofessional.
Limiting the option also limits how you can implement the platform.

I really would like to see BP mature so that we can apply it to any situation. Usernames or nicknames should be an option. You shouldn’t have to hack the core to allow regular people to use their real names.

[r-a-y]

@peterverkooijen – There are no conspiracy theories involved. If you have a solution, post it. I’ll make sure it doesn’t get deleted.

—

@eborg9 – the concept is quite simple. A username is something you login with, the “Name” field as mentioned here shows your real name in all places (except @mentions). The signup process is similar to that of Twitter’s.

[eborg9]

I don’t have a solution, I’m looking for one. And I’m not spouting paranoid conspiracy theories, I’m stating real world applications.

what I am looking for is a way to list members in the directory by their real names.

If I build one of these for a real company or organization, they don’t want their people listed in the members directory by the name they use to log in…they want them listed with the names on their business cards so that they can be found.
What good is an alphabetical listing or search function of fake names?

People aren’t blogging for fun, blogging is marketing. It’s the engine that drives online networking and having your activities and contributions hidden by a username, instead of your real name that you use for business, or at the very least your company name defeats the purpose.

I’d like to use this platform for real stuff, not just a group of people taking about beer, and that entails that people can be found in the directory in a way that people know to look for them. As long as there are limitations like usernames coded to display instead of actual names, then there will be limitations on how seriously people take it as a real solution.

Most people are savvy enough to know that you create user names and passwords to log into a system, but not marketing themselves or their business with that log in name. It’s juvenile and unprofessional.
If I join a niche community to Network, and promote myself and my business, I want people to see what my name is, not have to click through to my profile to find out who i really am.
I keep bringing up Facebook, but one of the things that appeals to people is that you can actually find people by their names, you don’t have to guess what the screen name is, or hunt down a photo ( that mayor may not be real) to see if you recognize them.

Web people think that everyone lives by screen names and avatars, and they don’t. Business people don’t network with their gaming name.
Taking away the possibility of simply using a real name is short sighted and limits the professionalism in which you can apply the platform.

I think believing that everyone who uses this platform and their users wants anonymity and a scree name to hide behind is short sighted. You can’t possibly make that decision for everyone and every possibility.
In the real world, screen names are the exception, not the other way around.
That’s all I’m saying.

You keep telling me that real names are used through out the installation and I am telling you that they are not. The members directory, one of the most important sections of this thing for any organization, list users by their username.. I have 3 of these built and they all list the members by username /so if indeed, real name are used everywhere else, but the directory doesn’t list real names…that’s even more confusing and screwed up.

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

“You keep telling me that real names are used through out the installation and I am telling you that they are not. The members directory, one of the most important sections of this thing for any organization, list users by their username.”

It doesn’t*. We’re looking at http://testbp.org/members/. ‘registered’ and ‘last active’ will order by those values, and it displays real names. If you order by ‘alphabetical’, however, I see a few issues:

*Page 1 of results is not sorting properly, at least on testbp.org; something weird is going on. But if you click through to page 5, for example, it does sort by real name correctly (“Aaron Brazell, Aaron Castaneda, Aaron Chaote”, etc). If you look at the link to their profile, that uses the username (as is designed), and in the case of Aaron Brazell, as an example, you see his username is nothing like his real name. But not on page 1.

This is obviously a bug, as the latter pages work, and this is useful feedback. The BuddyPress developers can only fix bugs if people report them (https://trac.buddypress.org/).

@peterverkooijen – as far as I know, none of your posts have been deleted. Some threads closed, yes, but not deleted. I’ve noticed too that some older forum posts are really hard to find since this site was updated a few weeks ago (so I look through Google, as BuddyPress search still sucks).

[peterverkooijen]

@eborg9 (“I’m not going to insult the decision to code it that way…”) I have argued your point for over a year, more diplomatically at first, with zero effect. The developer community here doesn’t care about this issue. In my comment I simply gave the reasoning I got from Andy (Automattic). Anonymous usernames rule in the WordPress world. Don’t hold your breath for it to change anytime soon. You’ll have to custom code around it.

@r-a-y (“There are no conspiracy theories involved.”) I think my ugly hacked solutions were deleted because they used a deprecated hook and parts of it were supposedly fixed in 1.2+ according to one moderator. Don’t remember the details.

[thelandman]

@peterverkooijen, @eborg9, if you guys are having issues then hire a developer to make a plugin. You could simply edit the template files (I think)

Create a First Name and Last name profile field. In the template files wherever http://pastebin.com/57Sm4VNu appears replace it with http://pastebin.com/hESCVX9D

Something along those lines.

[peterverkooijen]

@thelandman, in my solution I use javascript to generate the username from the weird semi-optional xprofile fullname field, hide the username field on the form, use the email login plugin so members don’t need the username to log in, add more custom code to synchronize the fullname and the fullname-derived username to all the various similar fields in the database, etc. It’s messy, but somewhat workable.

The point is that it should not be that hard. Using full names, Firstname Lastname, should be part of the core. Seeing that none of this is fixed in 1.2+ and probably will never be fixed, I have no plans to upgrade to newer versions of Buddypress and will continue developing my version as a fork, more suited for professional and business use. If anyone is interested in working with me on that, please contact me directly.

[Anonymous User 96400]

well, good luck with your fork, mate…

[eborg9]

I agree that something so obvious shouldn’t be that hard. I have only been using BP/MU for 3 months and WordPress for over 3 years, and the first couple of sites that I built, the username thing didn’t bother me, I assumed it was a setting or something that I overlooked. it was only while attempting to build an actual real world community that I noticed the limitation…and then searching around saw that this wasn’t something I was doing wrong…it’s the way it’s designed and that was really surprising.

IF you just look at it’s basic description:
“BuddyPress.org: Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team “

..those are all instances where you would need an accurate listing of people by their names. I naturally assumed that it was configured to be used as such. I never dreamed that it wasn’t. How would you use this for a company if you need to know the employees usernames to find them in the directory? That’s not very useful.

I guess I will have to find a developer so that I can use this in a real world application. I guess not enough people see this as a major flaw to do anything about.

It just seems so simple, and so obvious, I can’t believe it goes ignored.

[rich! @ etiviti]

BP can’t fill every feature gap nor everyone’s wishes – why plugins are created. Sure this can be easily done with bypassing some of the xprofile data (or create your own fields) and hook into the wp_usermeta first/last name. (even though xprofile is syncing that data)

[eborg9]

You know what’s funny, is that everyone is acting like using real names is some weird out of the ordinary thing that no one in their right mind would want. In the real world, real names are actually the norm. Usernames are the exception or option.

Doesn’t it seem strange that I have to hire a developer so that my Social Networking Community (in a box) allows people to use their actual names?

[Clive Hetherington]

I’ve used WP for years too and when I switched to WPMU and BB as a community the username default setup does not go down well. I’ve only a small number of registered only users and I set their display names to their name manually with each new registration (with less than 20 users that’s doable). Looking through my entire BB install I cannot find any username mentioned. So, maybe a plugin to automatically make users display name their first name (or first+second) would work for you? The @mention should also use the display name too else it’s probably unusable in a community space. Real people – real names. I paid to have BB chat component work with ‘display’ names for the same reason else some of my users would not know who they were chatting with.

[eborg9]

Yes! Thank you. At least someone gets it!
In the real world people don’t communicate in usernames.

[rich! @ etiviti]

—
*Page 1 of results is not sorting properly, at least on testbp.org; something weird is going on. But if you click through to page 5, for example, it does sort by real name correctly (“Aaron Brazell, Aaron Castaneda, Aaron Chaote”, etc). If you look at the link to their profile, that uses the username (as is designed), and in the case of Aaron Brazell, as an example, you see his username is nothing like his real name. But not on page 1.

This is obviously a bug, as the latter pages work, and this is useful feedback. The BuddyPress developers can only fix bugs if people report them (https://trac.buddypress.org/).
—

@DJPaul – same issue related to this trac ticket?
https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1670

[eborg9]

So, maybe it was intended to work “the right way” it’s just not functioning properly?

[r-a-y]

@clivoo – The problem with using display names with the @mentions system is display names can be duplicated; people can have the same name (eg. John Smith). Usernames are unique.

[peterverkooijen]

@r-a-y (“Usernames are unique.”) Only when they are required to be unique. You could also require display/real names to be unique. The emerging standard is that the email address has to be unique. The @mentions system could check by the email address connected to the real name. There really is no excuse to keep a username at the center of all things.