Usernames Instead of Numbers

February 5, 2006 7:50 AM

Pony: any chance of having the ability to look up a user by appending their username name to the "/user/" URL? The user number is okay, but being able to have the name as well would be really helpful.
posted by TheDonF to feature requests at 7:50 AM (9 comments total)

You can do it this way (substitute the username of your choice for mathowie).
posted by Gator at 7:53 AM on February 5, 2006

Or even this way.
posted by grouse at 8:00 AM on February 5, 2006

Ah, I wasn't aware of the username thing - I guess that would do the trick...
posted by TheDonF at 8:53 AM on February 5, 2006

Oh cool. We lost the username search field with the redesign, right? I've been plugging in a name into the search field and then clicking on threads they've commented in and then finding their user page that way, which is cumbersome as hell.
posted by CunningLinguist at 9:21 AM on February 5, 2006

Ha! I've been doing the same thing. I'll have to remember this feature.
posted by Afroblanco at 9:23 AM on February 5, 2006

Yup, I've been doing the same as CunningLinguist and Afroblanco. This is good to know, thanks.
posted by keijo at 10:53 AM on February 5, 2006

What would be quite cool would be, with a bit of regex fun, to check what the appended URL contained. If it contained only [0-9]+ then look-up a user's details via the user number; if it contained anthing else then do the look-up via the username. Doing that would mean not having to maintain /user/ and /username/. Just a thought.

And, for the record, I've been doing the same as CunningLinguist, Afroblanco and keijo.
posted by TheDonF at 3:19 PM on February 5, 2006

No. We have users whose usernames are all numbers, like 111. But his user number is 17256. Who's user number 111? Why, none other than delfuego.
posted by mystyk at 3:41 PM on February 5, 2006

Perhaps we could forcibly renumber people if someone registers their usernumber as a username.
(supposes this would result in a surge in number usernames and complaints from old-timers who were evicted from their numbers)
posted by Count Ziggurat at 7:31 PM on February 5, 2006