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Does anyone have a similar conversation happening?

We have been pulled into a conversation about is it okay for employees to use their true names as part of their usernames. In my years participating in and working with communities I have never seen some of the concerns pop up. I wanted to see if anyone else has had employees using their true name (first and last name) encounter these issues:

  1. doxing
  2. harassment
  3. targeted for sensitive data
  4. abused by trolls

We suggest to all users (internal and external) to choose a username you are comfortable with being seen on the platform, it is our only public facing component besides an avatar, I feel like this is pretty standard. Thank you

Hi Alison,

I think this really depends on the industry and type of community you are managing.

For most B2B communities it should not be an issue to use your real name, most people also have a public LinkedIn and many use non-anonymous social media as well. Many B2B communities are in fact used to build one’s public profile, it’s one of the motivators for people to participate. Most of the participants in the community also are not anonymous, which lowers the overall vitriol in discussions quite a bit.

For moderators of e.g. Reddit it’s a whole different ballgame, everyone is behind an pseudonymous or even throwaway accounts. There are no real-life repercussions for bad behaviour. There is a ton of toxic behaviour (the Reddit team is doing an amazing job of keeping it as low as it is), so moderators need to be pseudonymous. Same goes for a lot of gaming communities.

Many health-centered forums strongly recommend all participants to be pseudonymous.

So yeah, it depends 🙃

We’ve had a similar concern raised for our Community members - more often than not their Community user name is their work email address.

I’m new as an Admin in my Community, but I’d guess this is caused by the Community user name being copied from their user name for our software. But as software user names are private to their organisation, and Community user names are public, we are concerned about Community users not being comfortable/aware that their email addresses are publicly available.

Any tips on how to prevent Community user names defaulting to the user name for the associated product?

Hey @Sophie Lead Forensics !

I think I’ve seen something like this before. And it’s possible that you may need to have the SSO settings adjusted - the most likely issue I can think of is that the mappings for SSO between inSided (as the Service Provider) and your own SSO IdP (Identity Provider) aren’t set correctly.

inSided Support can usually fix this if you let them know.

Once it’s fixed, you can then assist your users changing their usernames to whatever they prefer.

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