Alternative Display Name Support

Before jumping into UI improvements for version 4, I'd like to spend a post talking about an important aspect of the software for version 4:

Alternative Display Name Support

The current version of the software displays users' login (the user name people sign up the forum with) beside their messages and in their user profiles, and users have to contact the admin if they wish to change their names for use on the forum. This system has been effective as a good way to identify message authors and to prevent users from changing their identity for malicious reasons (spamming the forum under a name and switch to a different identity at will), and most are satisfied with it.
 
However, over time we have received numerous requests to support alternative Author Name display on the message pages and user profiles (or rather, on all public facing pages like the online user list and gallery, etc.). These requests are usually from forum owners who integrated the software with an existing membership system.
 
In such cases, when integration is turned on, the forum software pulls the User Names directly from the existing membership, and it sometimes becomes problematic if the existing User Name field was not designed to be shown publicly, e.g. social security number, email address (SPAM), employee's ID, etc.
 
With the above demand in mind, in the next version, we will have the ability to support Alternative Display Name:

1. Users can select one of the following as their identity on the board:
   • Login (current implementation);
   • Display Name (his choosing);
   • First Name + Last Name;
   • First Name only.
2. Admin can decide how the board supports such functionality:
   • Whether Users can choose identity other than their login;
     • Admin can decide the default identity:
       • Login (current implementation)
       • First + Last Name
       • First Name
   • Whether to allow users to create a custom Display Name;
     • Custom display name must be unique;
     • Admin can choose how often the custom display name can be changed.

With the above specs, the new system will be flexible but also effective to prevent users from switching identities thus creates moderation and management difficulties for the Admins and Moderators.
 
In the next post, I will discuss an important aspect of SEO in the next version: Improved URL SEO options using ASP.NET URL Routing (not rewriting URLs anymore).

Most excellent.

• The next feature I would like to see (that would make it easier to integrate into an existing site) would be to provide the forum components as controls that customers (us) could then place on a page. This is more than just letting us modify the master page; this would be allowing us to put whatever controls we wanted on a form to lay out and choose what components we want displayed and where we want them displayed.
• The next feature would be to just integrate with our membership providor by giving us an Interface that we can write a providor to for the forum software to call for membership and roles. SO, to determine whether or not the "current" user has permissions, call code provided by us!

 
Thanks,
Owen