Tellitip 28: Using Display Names

communityserverHey there IndiansFanJoe3456!  Wow, that’s a mouthful.  Chances are that you have one of these accounts on a site that doesn’t let you be you because someone else is already you!  One of these sites may even be a Community Server site.  Well, there isn’t an excuse for this.  As of SP1 for CS 2008 we’ve enabled “friendly display names” by default.  Well, we’ve actually supported this for a LONG time and this post will show site admins how they can control this. 

Open your Community Server control panel and navigate down to Membership Administration > Configuration > Account Settings > Profile Settings. Step by step arrows here:

image

In the screenshot above you see the master On/Off switch for this feature.  Turning it on will enable the following option on a users profile settings page…

image

And for some inexplicable reason that we’ll resolve in a future release the user also has the ability to turn his or her display name on or off as shown here:

 

image

Long live “Indians Fan 4 Ever!”