> One registerd as a BumpyWordName becuase the registration screeen
> converted his 'real name' to the BumpyWord, but was then very angry
> becuase he couldn't log in as all lower case version of his name. Not
> only that but he expected his password to be 'ignore case'. My,my what
> bad habits Microsoft has brought us to.

Having users log in as their bumpy WikiName has always been a pain for me too - no matter what I write in the prompt they ignore it; and several months later there are large portions of the registered user population who do not ever make changes. The ones who do tend to be those for whom I clicked the "remember username" checkbox in I.E... Go figure.

People do not want to remember wikis as being case-senstivity different to every other system in the world they have ever known. Often they don't know they are on a wiki and why should they? Its just too intrusive.

Furthermore, when you deal with international people you start to encounter another reason why people like handles: in some countries long names are the rule rather than the exception. Business school friends of mine like Karthik Venkatasubramanian, and Kanokporn Tirabanchasak - both from India; Or, consider some Spanish names of people I met at a conference last week: "Mª Dolores Martínez-Carnonell López", "María Guadalupe Ramos Crespo", "Jorge Antonio Carvalho Sousa Valadares": each of these people has multiple first and last names, but some have three first names and one surname and others multiple surnames. Sheer disbelief would be leveled at be if I seriously expected them to log in with the whole of their real names. So Karthik Venkatasubramanian shortened his WikiName to KarthikV because he did not want to log have to log in with his full name, but now his topic is not his name, making him next to impossible for others to find.

Apparently TWiki can be made to use a standard (lowercase) login together with password - I need to try this myself but I believe its simply a case of including both the login field from TWikiRegistration and the password field of TWikiRegistrationPub; TWiki will then use this combination for interacting with the .htpasswd file and render as the wikiname.

-- MartinCleaver - 29 Sep 2004

This really, really isn't TWiki's problem. It's Apaches. If you use an different auth system you can call users what you want, and have them mapped to a wikiname. Let's not make TWiki any more complex than we have to!

-- IanRanaldCrabhardMcUirgh - 29 Sep 2004

It's TWiki's problem to the extent that we ship TWikiRegistrationPub without a login name field. I agree its not a problem with the TWikiKernel.

I just discovered LoginNameAliasesPlugin and thought again about EmailAddressAsLogin so these might offer might be of some help allowing users to log in more simply.

-- MartinCleaver - 29 Sep 2004