Display realname vs username

This is how all forums work, which is why you have the username for showing a username throughout the forum, and an email address field which is kept private.

You should never use the an email address as the username as the username is the persons public name/internet handle and is shown every where within the forum so that members can identify each other and know how has created a post, topic, etc.

This would take allot of work to change as the username field is unique in the database, the email field is not. As well as changing this which would break many established forums you also need to re-code massive amounts of pages within the forum to change how it works.

In most forums though admins want to ensure that they don't have members with the same name otherwise it leads to confusion. In your example of having multiple steve's you would not know which steve in your forum posted which post.

Forums generally rely on having unique usernames within the community so that people can recognise each other when chatting within the forum system. Abuse of forums is often a problem as well and if members had the same name it would lead to all sorts of issues.

For this and other reasons I can not see any benefit of having such a login system within a forum.

The only type of system where I could see it of use is if members could login using both their email address and/or their username, but still retained their unquie username as it is now for identifying members within the forum system.


Edited by WebWiz-Bruce - 01 December 2009 at 10:27am

Also, it is possible to display the real name in the forums instead of the username, but as Bruce pointed out, this could lead to confusion, since there may be more than one Steve and Real Names are not unique, but usernames are.