CUNY Academic Commons

The "Full Name" field on the BP profile is effectively the same thing as the "Display Name" field in the Dashboard.

For more context, WP uses "Display Name" when deciding what name should be put in the byline for posts, the byline for logged-in comments, and certain author-related archive pages. BP requires what has historically in the plugin been called "full name", and has more or less synced it to WP's "Display Name". In the BP context, it's used in directories, in group membership lists, on user profiles, in group forums, and so forth.

So, essentially, they play a similar role - the way that a user is described in public-facing user interfaces throughout the site - and they're programatically linked to each other in many contexts.

As far as privacy is concerned, perhaps what we want is to stop calling it "Full Name". Instead, we can use a label like "Display Name", and then have some helper text explaining that this is the text that'll be used in public contexts to describe you. We might suggest or encourage that individuals use their real name, but people could also choose abbreviations or pseudonyms.

Hi Boone,

thanks for explaining the context of how this works.

As far as privacy is concerned, perhaps what we want is to stop calling it "Full Name". Instead, we can use a label like "Display Name", and then have some helper text explaining that this is the text that'll be used in public contexts to describe you. We might suggest or encourage that individuals use their real name, but people could also choose abbreviations or pseudonyms.

I think changing the title of this field and adding a tool tip about public display of this info would be helpful. People could then choosing less identifying information and instructors could point students to this area if they have rationale/desire to not post under their full name.

I do wonder, however, if we want to log full name somewhere so we have an idea of users real/full names?

Colin, maybe this is something we can talk briefly about during tomorrow's team call.

As discussed in the monthly meeting on Friday, we are going to proceed with a simple technical solution here that will require some added documentation/education work.

We are going to rename the "Full Name" field to "Display Name" and allow people to put anything there. On the registration page, there is no "?" tooltip for Full Name right now. We will add one that explains what this field does -- this will be the main way their Commons account is displayed/identified, and it will be how their account is named in Google and other searches as well. Hopefully we can help people consider the privacy and attribution implications of what they put here.

In addition to this tooltip, we will likely need other documentation. Professors especially will need to talk to their classes about using display names that don't make it difficult to know which student is posting what in a class group or similar.

Laurie, do you want to think through this documentation a little more?

As we noted in the meeting, we will always have an identifiable private record of who is behind an account if we ever need it, regardless of their display name, because we will know the CUNY email used to sign up.

Noting also that it will be Display Name at registration and also if you go to Edit Profile in your settings. We might want the same tooltip in both places to guide users, though we don't use tooltips as much on the editing tab in the settings.

Forgot to bring this up in Tuesday's call -- can we get this change into the release, so we can lump it into our updates regarding privacy with the new Group Privacy changes?

I am working on documentation (linked) and need clarification on the relationship between username and display name.

https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/student-names-and-aliases/

Does someone need to use an alias when creating thier username or is using an alias in display name enough to cloak identity? I would think that they need to use an alias in both because though display name will be used on the Commons main pages, themes often pull the username to attribute post authorship? Is this correct?

This would mean that really cloaking your name requires alias use in both the username and the display name.

Laurie, you are correct. The username is also public information, in the sense that it's used for author pages on single sites (eg https://news.commons.gc.cuny.edu/author/colinmcd) as well as for your profile page on the main site (https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/colinmcd/).