ILIAS open source Forums

Within Chats, the participants are only displayed with their usernames up to now. However, usernames might well be only a code (within large organizations; some user administration tools are putting out usernames like "T371523"). Therefore, the prename and surname of the participants should be displayed within Chats.

We have request like this for other objects too, like forums for example. I would prefer a solution that fits for all objects - and is implemented within the entire system, not only in chat and or forum.

Usually - like in this PHPBB forum software - usernames or nicknames are used for identifying postings in chats or forums. So in IOSBB I know that you are Florian Suittenpointner - thanks to your signature. But in the system you appear only as 'suittenpointner'. And you find a lot of strange usernames in IOSBB quickly.

I we move to the use of real names in forums and chats we need to decide if the username is still displayed (e.g. in brackets) or if we do not use user names any more - which would make it more difficult to send an internal message to such a user.

So I would like to hear some comments from other users to this issue.

Do you prefer real names or user names for chat and forum postings?

Hi Matthias,

We need login names and real names.

The problem with real names is, that there can be more than one person with the same firstname and lastname. So, it is not sufficient to reliably identify a person.

(On our installation) login names are generated by the course administration system. The problem with login names (on our installation), is that they are just code sequences. So, they can't stand on their own, because no one knows the code sequence of another person.

But together, with the real name, logins help to (more or less) reliably disambiguate persons.

Best,
Werner

So you would prefer something like:

Matthias Kunkel (ahw16)

Have I understand you correctly?

And shall we present both real name and user name always?

Hm. I don't like the brackets.

I'd rather use thre lines. The first line contains the first name in bold, the second line the last name in bold, the last line the login in a smaller typeface. Eventually, we include a small foto of the poster as well. And maybe even the time of the post.





Displaying the time of the post has the advantage that it helps us to know, whether a chat is alife or stale.



If we display this for each post in a chat this will take up too much vertical space.

So, I suggest that we display this only for the last post of a person in the chat, for all other posts, the loginname is sufficient.
This has the added effect, that this will make the last post of a person stand out.

I think, with some CSS magic, this should be possible.
If this isn't possible (AFAIK know, IE 7 still sucks big time at CSS), we could display this for the first post of a person only, and then use the loginname for all subsequent posts.

What do you think?

I will ask Alexander if this layout can be realised without problems. It sounds not that easy as my bracket solution. But I understand your intention.