Customize profile URL

Hi Marina,

Thanks for writing! Do you know why is having a clean URL important for the user that asked for it? In what cases do they share their URL with other people? OR is it something else? 

In the meantime, we are opening this ticket for votes to see if others would also be intrested.

Might have to be careful with this one!

As far as I’m aware, the platform uses the number as the User ID to provide something that won’t change even if the username is changed. I can turn https://community.insided.com/members/julian-356 into https://community.insided.com/members/superjulian-356 and it would still correctly link back to Julian’s profile. I’m not sure if that can be changed without breaking something else. If the username is changed, the profile URL will be updated to reflect that, but the numeric ID remains the same to ensure the platform knows where to go. It’s also a guaranteed way to ensure that even if the username is changed and someone else takes on the old username, you’ll never accidentally land on the wrong user. This same trick is currently also used across inSided to allow pretty much anything to be moved without breaking it.

The ID number is the crucial part, the text is usually just a slug for SEO purposes. :)

It’s generally a bad idea to use purely the username for this purpose unless you have a way to handle name changes. If the username alone is the only identifier, then changing it would break pretty much every single reference across absolutely everything.