Considered Possibility for admin to change Username

[Anna]

I realised tonight that I as admin can change password for a user, but not the username. Which causes the unfortunate situation that someone that may change blogs/sites often (it happens quite often in my list-world) or add more than one at a time - when their old ones are removed they are stuck with usernames like: "Normalusername-1234346-345675". I noticed that I as an admin can change the name of the account owner, but the username. So I can not reset username to its original :-( One solution would ofc be to tell user to change url etc at control panel. But I feel it to be extra work when it have to be easier for admin to be able to change it no?

 

[Mark]

Sure, we will try to make this addition to 1.1

its always risky to change the username though as link codes on members sites will need to be updated, and from my experience people tend to not read or think things like this through. Still, the admin should have this ability.

if you are in a pinch, you can make teh edit direct in your database using phpmyadmin, the sites, and stats table would both need to be updated.

 

[Basti]

Totally against this, many plugin make use of the username column in some way, would be impossible to let the admin username change function handle that all.
If we do that i see many broken plugins ahead of us
For example, new blog plugin will store the username of the poster, what if you change a username? lost posts is a result.

What of details pages? will be hell to setup proper redirections

I feel it may be a better route to make login global to avoid all this mess in which that would result in.

 

[Mark]

hardly impossible but no doubt could be a pain in some spots.

redirects would not be handled at all, if they change the username it will 404 and thats the end. If the admin wants to setup redirects via .htaccess that is their choice, but the core cannot be responsible for handling everything.

now the blog module is a good example, if the username changes that would indeed "orphan" those posts unless another query was run to convert them to the new username (not really a big job, but if we consider all the plugins that need to be maintained... it might be). Indeed, all of this cleanup really could get messy, quickly.

I feel it may be a better route to make login global to avoid all this mess in which that would result in.

please explain what you mean, and how exactly this would help this problem.

in the end, might be better off to write a tutorial how to change a username manually, and it would only be for advanced users... but it needs to be possible one way or another.

 

[Basti]

please explain what you mean, and how exactly this would help this problem.

Was thinking either
a) give a random subuser username / pass of owner ( though could lead to same issues with blog etc )
b) make login global, so the user not logs in with the individual pass for that subuser ( or the #1 user ), but let everyone login using the owner. That means though giving all subusers the same pass as the original. Dont see that issue though, as originally they dont know their subusers pass anyway and dont login individually - thats why we give them random pass, as we want them to login into their main account.
so username-1231 logs in using a global loginname of "username" which is the owner

That way user Jake and subuser Jake-1231 ( in case owner gets deleted ) can both login as Jake. And we dont need huge edits for this or worry about lost pageranks of details or plugin pages

 

[Anna]

make login global, so the user not logs in with the individual pass for that subuser ( or the #1 user ), but let everyone login using the owner. That means though giving all subusers the same pass as the original. Dont see that issue though, as originally they dont know their subusers pass anyway and dont login individually - thats why we give them random pass, as we want them to login into their main account.
so username-1231 logs in using a global loginname of "username" which is the owner
That way user Jake and subuser Jake-1231 ( in case owner gets deleted ) can both login as Jake. And we dont need huge edits for this or worry about lost pageranks of details or plugin pages

A big fat YES to this if its doable! Especially if the last line is workable!!! As it has been now (And I know I have slightly different clientel than most listowners) they have not really been aware of the fact that they are Jack-1231 as long as the original owner name is intact....