Different display name than username
 

Hi,

For my study program I need to set up a forum for students to be able to communicate with eachother. Since all the students already have an account to access the website portal of the university I was asked if the username and pass for the forum could be the same as that of the portal. That is not really difficult, but it's not really nice if our board has 120 members all with a username like: 432556kd. That's why I want the users to be able to set there own display name without changing there username. I know that Invision has this option implemented, but since I am not a real big fan of Invision, I was wondering if there is a modification for vbulletin available that has this feature?

Greetings,
Fabian

I don't think we've ever had the option, and I'm not sure how simple it would be by default to change the system to work another way. It might be easier to change the login system to check another peice of infromation rather than change the system to display something besides the username field.

It can be done. You would need to add a new custom field for "Display Name" & set it to be required. Then using vBulletin template system & conditionals to show that custom field in the place of username. Further more, it shouldn't be hard to write a plug-in that makes it a user choice whether to display username or "Display Name".

username appears in many places, and it would be a lot of work to cover them all (and may have some odd effects).

You could allow them to set custom usertitles, and then they could put thier name in the user title - it appears next to (or under) the name in most places.

Or use Steve M's Alias hack

Yeah, if you want to fully change the name displayed from username to "display name", there're quire a few places that you have to edit, both in templates and codes.

There're many location where "userfield" table is not included in the queries/

I have made it, so that my forum display a custom field instead of username in most of the important places, but there are too many places that you gonna need to edit (in code), that I wouldn't bother to release.

If vbulletin offers some "display name" as a default feature, that'd be super great :D