Proposal to use email instead of username for user registration

[Edric Navarro (enav)]

Hello Jooml! ppl.

I do like to know your opinion about the usage of the Email instead of an User name for user registration. I also have the idea to add an option to disable or hide the user registration by user name and only use the email.

I got several clients so far that ask to remove the user name and only use the email for user registration, this is particularity annoying because i have to do several language overrides and template overrides to make this work the way the client request. Basically i let the people populate the mail field and duplicate that same value for the user name field which is a bit silly and redundant, I do like to see something more solid and elegant such as a native alternative for this common request.

[Ole Ottosen (ot2sen)]

There is a plugin 'Email as Username' that does that, and it seems rather popular with many having the issue you describe
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension/access-a-security/site-access/email-as-username

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[Chris Davenport]

I think this is a very common requirement these days and I'd be open to considering a pull request to add that option to Joomla 3.6.  The first question to address would be how it should be done.

Chris.

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Chris Davenport
Joomla Production Leadership Team

[Joomlagate China]

I think the best solution is offering both username and email to be valid as login name, which the site Admin can choose at Joomla backend. 

[Roberto Segura]

I already have my own plugin for this and it's quite simple (around 60 lines including comments). A new plugin that retrieves the username from email and then calls the standard joomla user authentication. So you don't need to rewrite anything.

It's a plugin so I'd enable it by default on new installations but users still can disable it through plugins manager.

I'll be happy to contribute it.

[brian teeman]

Its a bit more complex than just using the email as the username.

We have multiple text strings that would need to change as well and possibly the whole reset password/username functionality.

The username reminder functionality becomes redundant for example. As the only way to find out your username is to enter your email address and if you know the email address then you dont need to ask

[Chris Davenport]

Thanks Roberto.  I'd love to take a look at that.  Is it online somewhere?

I'm not sure about enabling it by default on new installations.  I could go either way on that.

Chris.

[Chris Davenport]

Yes, you're right.  I've been asked to do this for a couple of websites now and now I come to think of it in both cases I ended up spending more time overriding language strings than writing code.  That's definitely something we'd need to think about.

Chris.

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[Janich Rasmussen]

I do believe this is one of those long awaited feature by many people.

But as Brian points out, there is more to it than "just" the authentication.

What about the "email" field?

Should it be hidden? Or use the same value (as the username field)? Or should it just be a separate field? 

Also the 'forgot username' feature. Is it expendable then?

And then the 'forgot password' feature. (I believe it had some issues as well when I made my own plugin for it last year).

And finally - should the admin be able to turn it on/off? (and if so - what about the above?)

Maybe Im missing some, but this seems like it needs planning.

But when that's done, I'd love to help make it happen.

/ Janich

[Roberto Segura]

I don't see where is the complexity. Have you used twitter? Enter username or email. Done. You may need to replace 1 text string. Have you used our gmail authentication plugin? What's the difference?

Ping me when the planning phase is done and the doing phase begins.

[brian teeman]

On Tuesday, 17 November 2015 22:40:36 UTC, Roberto Segura wrote:

I don't see where is the complexity. Have you used twitter? Enter username or email. Done. You may need to replace 1 text string. Have you used our gmail authentication plugin? What's the difference?

The difference is that one is an external service and one is internal. I will be honest and say I've never used the gmail one on a live site. 

I still dont know how you handle the forgotten username stuff and registration on a system where the username=email

If we could see the code then maybe it would be easier for us to see how you have addressed that.

Or are you proposing changing completely from a system that uses a username to one that uses an email address.

[Edric Navarro (enav)]

What will happen with 3rd party extensions like forums or comments that display a username to conseal the emails.

Obviously this extensions need to update but to use what if there will be no username available.

What about if we change the user name field for something like nickname. By default the nick will be something like Anonimous but it can be customized at the profile editor page.

This way we can remove that much importance from the username field and have this as an optional field and also something to use on 3rd party extensions that need to show something like a nickname.

At the user manager a button can be created to switch if username is enabled for registration or not. Some views or templates must adapt to this switch

[Anibal]

Hi,

These are two different use cases:

a. Login with username or email: this case is close to the current practice. It is a way to simplify site usability.

b. Login only with email: this is  a radical departure from current implementation. There is Username field, so it has to be filled with email to keep general consistency....and this redundancy has to be maintained. Besides mod_login and com_users modifications, extensions showing username have to be customized to show Name field. On the bright side, for Single sign-on (SSO), this case helps to define a single friendly way to identify users (username definitions vary between systems).

[Vic Drover]

If it can currently be handled with a plugin, surely it can be built into core so that the username can be forced to be a valid email. Then end users have choice, which I think is appropriate. Just a config switch to force username as email. 

If it gets into core, you could debate later on wether or not the feature is enabled by default on new installs.

Cheers,

Victor Drover
Founder and CEO, Anything Digital
Co-founder, Watchful.li & jInbound.com
262-923-8200 ext. 0
Facebook: AnythingDigital | watchfulli | JInbound
Twitter: @VicDrover | @AnythingDig | @watchfulli | @JoomlaInbound

[Manoj Londhe]

I see privacy issue-

For extensions like - Easyblog or Easydiscuss, which use username to generate user specific URLs, this could be violate user privacy.

Like, I don't want search engines to show search results that have my email id in the URLs for any website...

[George Wilson]

You can turn the parameter off then and force usernames. There's only so much we can do in core!