Forum:Display names

As part of the Gamepedia migration, Wowpedia accounts were merged with Curse's user database. If your Wowpedia username was already used by another user of Curse, you will have had to change your Wowpedia username when you first logged in after the merge.

You can, however, still use your old Wowpedia username as your Display Name, which the wiki software makes an effort to display alongside your username at every possible opportunity, making links to your User: and User talk: pages look something like Foxlit (User:Foxlit) and Foxlit (User talk:Foxlit). The parenthesized part displays the actual user name and where the link goes to; the prefix is the user's display name. As an example, if the Curse account "foxlit" was already in-use by someone else, I would have had to change my Wowpedia username, and would then appear as something like Foxlit (User:NotFoxlit), while the Curse foxlit would have to pick a different display name on Wowpedia, like NotFoxlit (User:Foxlit).

This user name / display name rewriting appears in virtually all locations that display user names or link to the User/User talk namespaces: Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, categories, any wikitext containing a link to your user/user talk page is not given an explicit and different link text, and in the header and title of your User/User talk pages.

While the display names mitigate the pain of having to change usernames as a result of the merge, there are some issues:
 * Rewriting the h1 in User/User talk namespaces constantly makes me think "What is this user article doing in the main namespace!"
 * Rewriting links to the modified articles in Special:RecentChanges is similarly confusing: "Why is Foxlit creating an article for himself in the main namespace?"
 * The redundancy when displaying user names like Kaydeethree (User:Kaydeethree) gets somewhat tiresome, especially when Special:RecentChanges displays several users editing a single article.
 * Links to your old account's pages (for instance, in old signatures) are not updated, leading to red links, e.g. Dark T Zeratul (talk).

From Curse's side, the current situation is described as a result of a long discussion, which is unlikely to be changed in the future.

To address some of the issues discussed above, I wrote a gadget (additional, optional client-side javascript) that changes how display names look on the wiki. You can enable it for yourself by going to the gadgets tab of your preferences page, checking "Reformat display names and User namespace links" and clicking "Save". The gadget does the following:
 * User: and User talk: headers now start with the article title (like any other article on the wiki). If (and only if) the user's display name differs from their username, it is displayed in square brackets after the article title.
 * Examples:  User:Foxlit  vs  User:DarkTZeratul [Dark T Zeratul] 
 * Links to User:/User talk: pages intended to display usernames (RecentChanges authors list, history, etc) show the display name; if the username differs, the link is formatted differently.
 * Examples: Foxlit  vs  Dark T Zeratul.
 * Links to User:/User talk: pages intended to display articles (RecentChanges article titles, simple wikitext links) display the article title; if the user's display name differs from the user name, it is displayed in square brackets after the link.
 * Examples: User:Foxlit  vs  User:Dark T Zeratul  [Dark T Zeratul]

Please share your thoughts on whether the gadget works reasonably (or if there is anything that should be changed). If this scheme seems more sane than the current implementation, we could use it by default for all visitors (preserving the ability to opt-out via user preferences).

I'm also considering running a bot to update the pre-user merge User:/User talk: links to point to people's new usernames. Please let me know if you want links to your User:/User talk: pages updated (or if you think that this plan is not quite sane).

— foxlit (talk) 18:32, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It's a lot to think about, but right now I can definitely say that since the only change to my username was the removal of the underscores (stupid alphanumeric-only rule), I have no problem running a bot to convert all my old user links. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 18:54, 2 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Signatures in wikitext are also a bit problematic: wikitext like  is transformed to include your display name; and the gadget treats this as an article rather than a user reference. You can avoid this by setting "User Signature" in the user profile section of User:Preferences to e.g.   and checking "Treat signature as wikitext (without an automatic link)". You could also use your display name as the link text for the User: page link, which would remove the need for the span tags. — foxlit (talk) 20:45, 2 August 2013 (UTC)