On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 9:15 PM, Evgeny Fadeev fadeev@rocketmail.com wrote:

Hello, I am maintaining a wiki where I want real name to be shown instead of a login nick.

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Is there a way to change (hopefully in one, or maybe a few place(s)) - how user name is shown throught the site? (recent changes, page history, titles of user pages?). Nicks would still be useable by whoever wants them.

But is your aim to show the real name instead of the nick in all places or just in some of them? Do you prefer that the real name is show everywhere or there is a reason why the nick should be shown in same case?

Note that the name shown in recent page, history and similar is also used as a link to the user page (and his/her talk page, contributors, etc.).

So if for you is good that the real name is displayed everywhere and you have no need to display the nick, the easiest way (at least on what programming concern) is to force to user to register with their real name in the username filed.

If you want the user to always sign with his/her real name you should also disable the ability to use an alternative signature (the one made with 4 o 3 tilde) (but this is actually of little use, since the user can not sign anyway or forge a different signature anyway).

This of course rise problem of how to be sure that the real name is the real name (and also the philosophical question about what is the difference between a so call real name and a nick, and why a nick can not be ontologically considered real). But of course all of this question are outside the subject of this mailing list.

The only point to note is that if you really want to set up a system that allow an user to register only after you have checked his/her identity, you have to use something that disable the account creation until you have done the check (something like the Extension ConfirmAccount)

AnyFile