Make it possible that user can change their usernames by themselves

@xiaoyu-shen since launching on 9/21, I have only received the request once, so its not something i think that is dire necessarily, but I agree with others that its not intuitive that you can or can’t edit the username. In our instance, our community members will choose to put their brand name as their username, but then perhaps consider changing it to their own name. 

From personal experience on this community, I know I tried my first time to change my username since I thought I would primarily be a lurker and it didn’t matter, but turns out I participate more than I initially thought I would! 

@Selina we also had a few members tell us it was unclear - so we’ve added this phrase to our account creation pop-up “ Tip: Your username will display as your profile name in the community.” As a result, we have seen a change in what usernames are getting created vs. the browser suggestion prompt that most members were defaulting to before.

Hi,

After our migration to Gainsight, we had to assign usernames to all users since the previous community used email addresses as usernames. Now, we're receiving feedback from users who would prefer the ability to change their usernames themselves.

It would be incredibly helpful if you could implement a feature that allows users to easily update their usernames on their own. This would greatly enhance user satisfaction and give them more control over their profiles.

Thanks for considering this improvement!

Since migrating over to GS, we’ve gotten a couple of requests from users to change their username; as a B2C org, our users don’t want part of their email (which often has a combination of first and last name/initial) on a public space, where it could be easily guessed. This also seems to be an issue given the use of SSO with our platform. 

Having this gives users more power over their privacy + also seems to be an expected feature for users. 

Thanks!

We are getting ready to launch our Community and this is one consistent piece of feedback that we’ve received from our beta testers - that they want the power to change their username.   This also creates extra work for our admin and delays user adoption.

The ability for the user to change their profile information such as first name, last name, email, user name, role should be out of the box behavior.  

I would also really like this feature! +1 from me!

+1 !
Otherwise if changing usernames is complicated, for me a solution would be to have an additional field on a user profile (which can't be deleted): “Display Name”. If the field is filled this is what shows up on the front-end in the community, otherwise it shows the username.

+1 on this, since we’re looking at provisioning users with auto-register from product → community, i’d love to have a screen that prompts then to change their username or simply give them this options

This would also be useful for the single sign-on migrations from Customer Education, etc. The process auto-creates users so it would be nice to have an activation step that prompts users to change their username as mentioned above.

​@Saymon Very interested in this. How do you envision implementing the auto-register?

​@Jef Vanlaer this is already possible with SSO enabled. Basically if a user is logged in our product, a web-app in our case, and they transition to community via a link inside the app which will be an auth link, Gainsight will get the data it needs, I think email, username and ID or something like that, and auto-register the user. This way the user is already logged in when they are in Community. It’s quite common in very large communities.

We’re looking to implement this soon! 

It’s mind-boggling to me that this is not an option! How has this been open for more than 4 years! Come on! This is basic user functionality. ​@Gainsight CC Team 

We don’t support this yet but this idea is valid and we will continue to explore.

Adding my voice to the choir here. We are mid-migration from another platform to CC, and had to make some quick decisions about names to avoid sharing PII. I’m expecting big waves of requests to update users’ usernames once we go live, since we had to change their original usernames quite a bit. I was under the impression they would be able to update them on their own. 

We've made a special topic in our Community where users can request username changes. It's a little over 3 years old and has 290 comments. Half of which, give or take, is my team confirming the change. So about 145 username change requests in three years.

It would be useful if users could do this themselves. But, I would like this option, if it comes, to be locked behind a custom permission. Because we also have some users who would delight in changing their username a lot, and potentially confusing other users. 

Also, it would need to adhere to blocking rules, so we can set words that users are not allowed to have in their userame.

Thanks everyone for the continued feedback and detailed use cases here—we can see this is an important ask, especially for customers managing identity across SSO systems and evolving privacy needs.

Today, usernames in the platform are admin-controlled only. This is intentional, as usernames are tied to identity consistency across the system (e.g., mentions, audit history, and moderation workflows).

What we will explore

• Introducing a separate “display name” field that users can update themselves, while keeping a stable system username behind the scenes.

let me know what you all think about it

Oh, that would be ideal. I love this idea, ​@deepan!

That would be a workable solution for us ​@deepan!