Email address vs Nickname?

Ben Nolan
Sun, 13 Mar 2005 23:29:47 -0000

Hi,

I''m putting together a rails sites with multiple users. I want to be
able to refer to each user as:

http://site.com/user/:username

Which works fine - however, it has brought home to me the fact that only
identifying users by email address could be annoying (ie - having to
post your email address whenever you post a link to your home on the
site). But I want to promote transparency in the site and avoid
complexity - thus I designed the site using only the email address as a
user identifier.

I guess I''ve decided that I have to support nicknames (login names) for
users, for nicer URLs and some spam protection - but I just thought I''d
say that it sucks, because I like using email addresses only.

Any thoughts before I re-add a login field to my users table? :/

Ben