wordpress requires a user login at registration, but not a username – actually there is no such thing as a username in wp…  do you mean the user login?  suspect so…

have the other users actually selected a first and last name?  WordPress does not actually force those fields to be filled in… if users have not filled them in on their wp or sp profile, we wont be able to use them…  can you check and see if they are filled in?

If not, you might want to use a registration plugin for wp that adds those fields to the wp registration form…

also, have you checked other locations in the forum? is it just the members list?  what about in the posts themselves?

I created a dummy login for myself just to see how the process worked and I have filled in my first name and last name in the profile, but it still displays a username – I am jaygee1969 in the screenprint above.

I have tried this myself this morning on my local development/test site and it did work as expected – with one exception.

The first thing I have to say is that heeding the warning on the profile admin page where I set my display name preference I WAS very patient and waited for the panel to in form me that it had done what it was supposed to do. Now this did take a while and that is something we need to address. But it did do it. Now – if you did not wait for the yellow message to pop up to say it had finished and instead selected another admin page or loaded something else then the process would have stopped which would result in user records not being updated as planned.

If you go back to the profile panel where you set display name preference – is it still set as you want it?

Also – having been through this process I also set up a new user and again – it set the SP display name as I preferred.

The exception – by the way – were for those users who had not supplied their first/last names and I need to look in the code to see what it assigned them in its place.

Now, this is interesting.  I went to the profile panel and reset the preference by clicking it on, saving and then clicking it off again and saving again.  Both times the yellow box came up and it did come up fairly quickly.

What seems to have happened now is that the Display Name has been set as First Name and then the Last Name Initial with a string of random numbers after it – most odd!  See below:

Can I get rid of this random number and can I prevent it from coming up again on new members?

I am still trying to find out what might be causing it… when I know that we can get it fixed up.

Hi there.  Have you had any ideas yet about why I am getting a random number in the display name?  This site is not yet live, but I am hoping to get it online shortly and would like this working before I do, so any help would be appreciated.

Ah yes indeed. The problem arises – for example – when you choose something like first-name/last-name yet the user has not created that data. It gets replaced by the random number.

Now I have actually made a change to this as a random number seems a bit odd so now it will increment from the number 1. So – for example – if you juts used the users first_name but there were many named ‘Andy’ it would result in Andy, Andy1, Andy2 etc.

So your problem manifested itself because of missing data.

The fix is currently in test and will make it into the next SP update provided it all tests out OK.

What you say makes sense, however in this instance all the users HAVE input a first and last name!

Any clashes so that more than one user would end up with the same display name?

Actually yes, these are all users that I had already created on the site as they are moderators, and they have then added a new registration – obviously just trying out the process to see how it works.  They are all ones that can be deleted as there is no need for them to have two user accounts, however if that was not the case is there any way that I would be able to amend the display name, i.e. in the unlikely instance that two people had the same name?

As a forum admin you can edit any users profile by bringing up their profile popup and then clicking on the edit link at the top.

Whilst I can edit a user’s profile it will not allow me to edit the display name – this is greyed out.

hah! I didn’t think of that. Because you do not allow people to create their own Display Name!
Now – I think there might be a good case to suggest that an Admin should still be able to change it so I will open that up for discussion here…
I will have to check but I might be able to offer you the code fix for the original number issue but you would have to edit the code manually if it is possible. Although we are still in the testing phase for this of course.

I am still having issues over user display name.

I thought I had resolved this but it seems not.  I recently created a second profile for myself because I wanted to test out what different ranks of users would see on the forum as I was playing with permissions.  Initially it showed two users both with the same display name, but I note today that my Admin user name now appears with the random number after it that we discussed.  I am a little concerned that it is this display name that has been affected – surely as that one was created first it should stay the same and any users created later should be the one to be affected?  Also, because I have no intention of keeping the second user profile as this was just for test purposes, my main admin Display name is now left with the random number and I have no way of removing it.

The second problem with user display names is that, although I have it set to default to First Name, Second Initial I have to keep going back to the forum settings and resetting this option to force it to happen – it is not happening automatically whenever a new user registers.  Surely, if it is a DEFAULT, the display name should DEFAULT to that automatically?  Furthermore, when I do this, although it will change the display name in the members list, at the bottom of the forum where members are listed, the display name stays the same as it was before I updated the settings.