Should users have usernames or not?
I am building https://bugshare.io to be community focused product with additional features you can pay for. I was wondering if it was a good idea to allow users to have unique usernames for their profiles, or just use their user id and a slug of their display name.
https://website.com/@julian or https://website.com/users/1337/julian
A real world example would be, the stackoverflow style for user profiles https://stackoverflow.com/users/10548884/coder-guy
and
the makerlog style https://getmakerlog.com/@_UchennaOkafor
I would also love to hear which one you prefer and your reasons why.
It depends. Usernames can be useful if you're building something where user identity is public, and is handy where other users can reference that user, so for example @-ing someone.
People might also want to set their own slug, which is easier to get from the username than from their display name, since their display name might have many characters to escape (non-standard Latin letters such as the Maltese Ġ or Turkish dotless i, or a completely different alphabet like Cyrillic or Kanji). I go by @fiiv here, but if you took my slug from my display name you'd get @miketimofiiv or something, which might not be desirable for me. I might also want to say something like "Josh from Primcloud" like @joshmanders does – it's a personal customisation choice.
Also consider that a display name might change reasonably often. I might choose to use a longer or shorter form of my name, use a last initial or my full last name, might have a maiden name, choose to use a nickname, add things like rainbow emoji to it for Pride month, that kind of thing.
So, if you have profiles or personal feeds, consider having a username.
@fiiv I agree. I used to consider usernames as a burden from development stand point, because to uniquely identify user the email address should be sufficient. But when we are building community platform or something that may evolve to one, user names are crucial to let people own their unique piece of identity.
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