My username is my callsign, KC1LQM. iNaturalist only allows lowercase usernames, thus my username appears as ‘kc1lqm’. I’m advocating for a cosmetic change, the ability to select/save how your username is cased, upper, lower, or inter.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the whole username process be case-sensitive (e.g. John is a different user than JOHN, or john) as that could lead to confusion. Only that users be able to have their preference of how their username is displayed.
I think this is worth consideration, as many usernames might follow the pattern of “first name”“last name” (e.g. johnsmith, margretatwood) and displaying those with intercased letters would render them more readable (JohnSmith, MargetAtwood)
best and 73,
KC1LQM
Welcome to the forum, @KC1LQM. Just FYI, you can (and presumably should) vote for your own feature requests by clicking the blue “vote” box to the left of the title.
Heya @mira_l_b ,
I’m thrilled to join the community. Somehow it didn’t feel intuitive to vote for my own suggestion, so thank you for the tip.
I feel your pain. I changed my name from ArboretumAmy to arboretum_amy because the lack of uppercase made it unclear what I was trying to say.
Now that I think about it, I was going to be MiraLB but became mira_l_b once I realized it wouldn’t let me. I probably wouldn’t change it now because I am used to it but I do dislike having to type underscores.
@arboretum_amy Exactly!
Thanks for voicing your support, I’m sure there are others out there too who had to devise workarounds like you did.
I do sort of appreciate the informal atmosphere that all-lowercase names supports, but I don’t have a strong opinion either way.
So it’s not Arbor Etu Mamy?
Yes please - especially since we have multiple languages here.
Insect man rjpretor is Mr Pretorius.
It is sometimes hard to know which way to split a string of letters into meaningful words.
Cool, I think we can do this. I’m thinking an Account Setting below Username that allows you to type in the way you want your username to appear, using the characters which make up your username. That sound OK?
That sounds great, yeah!
Did this ever happen?
And if so, is it available for existing users (or just new users)? And just for the forum (where it appears to be active) or iNat?
I sure hope so. I want to change my username so that it reads the same but doesn’t show up on engine searches. Capital letters would allow me to do that and it would alleviate a lot of my anxiety. It also just seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult or hard to do. But I could be wrong about that part.
I was guessing Arbor Et Umami, “tree and savory flavor”, with an idiosyncratic spelling.
We should probably all revise our names over time, to reflect the taxonomic flux and confusion in so many organisms. I bet @aspidoscelis was once called cnemidophorus in his younger days.
You should already have the ability the change your username in your Account Settings, so you can test and see if it allows capitals. If it doesn’t, would numbers or any other symbols work for what you’re thinking?
It didn’t. I wasn’t sure if that was an issue on my end or not though, so I asked to be sure. And unfortunately no, not really. I already have it so my name, not username but just name, is with two capital i’s instead of L’s, because it looks the same but makes it a little harder to detect in general. Being able to do the capitals would make it really convenient but I can still make it work without that. Though, I’d be really happy to see the request pan out because it’d be handy.
Okay, I was wondering if that’s what you meant so I was thinking of 11 or whatever the longer vertical line || is called (plus there are a ton of other Unicode vertical line symbols). But yeah those are a bit more visible and there are probably contexts where only letters work.
I’ve tried using different keyboard characters, such as a Greek O or a Greek K but no dice. Doesn’t let you. Even though it’s a letter, technically. Symbols don’t work other than dashes or underscores, so the || doesn’t hold up. All in all, not a huge problem for me and I have a solid workaround currently, but this feature request really hits the nail on the head for what I would be interested in, so I thought I’d revisit.