You can change your username here now

I found and enabled a setting that lets you change your username in Discourse, regardless of how it’s set in WordPress. Apparently the single-sign-on from WordPress relies on an ID, so changing the username shouldn’t break the connection in any way.

Once you’re logged in here, click your avatar in the upper-right corner and then click the little gear icon in the drop-down menu. The resulting preferences screen has your username on it, and you can click the pencil icon to open it for editing.

@tidbits1 Give this a try (though, ironically, as soon as you change it, this mention will break. :-))

cheers… -Adam

Great, that worked. Thanks!

I was aware of where these settings are, but I couldn’t edit the username yesterday. Did you make changes in the meantime?

Yes, there’s an “sso overrides username” setting. The initial thought was that it made sense to have a single source for all that information at WordPress, but once we saw it in action, it became clear that wasn’t ideal.

If there is ever a way to customize the email address notifications get sent to let me know. For now I’ve turned off all email notifications since I don’t want them in my personal email (which sends me notifications).

Just as with username, you should be able to customize the email address. Click your avatar, click the gear, and click the pencil icon next to your email address. Discourse says that your email address is never shown to the public.

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Is the method illustrated above still working? I don’t see a “pencil” icon next to my username when I go to this screen. I changed my username on the main TidBITS site, and I’d like to follow suit here. (Sorry to bump such an old post, but I couldn’t find any more recent comment on this issue.)

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No, sorry, it doesn’t work because Discourse has a setting that disallows username changes after a certain number of days. I had set that to 10 days, and while I’ve now upped that to 30 days, bumping it to thousands of days seems like a recipe for problems.

However, as an admin, I can always change someone’s username, so just let me know what you want and I’ll twiddle it.

What I don’t know, and this might be the reason Discourse discourages username changes, is if it will update every @mention of you throughout. Or perhaps they’re just trying to prevent people from being jerky and changing their usernames repeatedly.

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Thanks, Adam. Please set my username to “fischej”. Not worried about the @mentions. I’m not that popular. :laughing:

@fischej, I’ll do that now, and then we can see what happens with the @mention I just made for you.

And lo and behold, Discourse did the right thing and updated @mylists to @fischej in my previous reply. Cool software…

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Thanks, Adam!

Wow. That was totally unexpected, and reveals what is (probably) going on under the covers.

I assume this means that @mentions in text are replaced with some kind of internal object referencing a user ID number (or however the user table is indexed).

If it was stored as text, then the system would have to search/replace references in all messages system-wide, which would be a slow and potentially risky action.

Of course, I could just download the sources and look at the implementation, but I’m not that curious.

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