Email address as Username

I am using standard ASP.NET membership provider on my site,  but I modified it a little to save the email address as the username, so users can register faster and log in using their email address. 

This is becoming somewhat of a best practice, so I am wondering if your forum has a solution for integrating with this type of site or if you have a recommendation when using your software.

We can integrate without any issue with this type of provider technically speaking. However, user will see their email address as their user name which can be a problem (spam).

However, if you can issue an authentication cookie that contains the username (not email) on your site, it will fix the problem. We recognize forms authentication cookie's content as the user name in our software for integration purposes.

[edit] the above wouldn't work as our software when communicating with your provider, will get your email directly as you store email as the username[/edit]

I believe the way to work with this is to modify our spRegister stored procedure so that when it imports your user (email), it will take the portion before @ as the user name and register an account into our db. And you will need to issue formsauthentication cookie using the portion before @ in order to achieve Single Sign on.

The portion before @ by itself is not sufficient since it can be the same for multiple users with different email domains, but I get the idea. It's not really an ideal solution since users will end up with default usernames that they can't change unless they also change their email address. 

I believe the optimal solution would have been to allow logging in with the email address, and use a profile parameter for the forum username, but I have not yet found software that does this. It probably makes more sense for e-commerce sites than for stand-alone forum sites.

I am thinking that you can use our software's own membership provider to register user to our forum db on your registration page instead of having our software work with yours.

1. On your own registration page, ask what forum username your user wants to use;
2. Use this piece of info to call our membership provider to insert a user into our forum db;
3. And only allow users to log in from your site. And once logged in, check our forum db to get the forum user name based on the user's email, and issue a forms authentication cookie.
4. Remove the ability for users to update email from the forum software (easy)

This would work flawlessly, and would only require a very simple modification to your own registration logic.