Geeklog Forums

I was wondering if there was a way for the forums to display the realname instead of the username in all the different places. I would take the time to figure out and find this myself but i'm already over my head in work.

The reason behind this is everyone that uses the site knows the names of the people who have access to accounts (general users don't get to login) and they don't really know these people by username as these can be really far off from actual name. Any help would be awsome.

curious what your users would say about that... it sort of defeats the purpose of a username altogether doesn't it.
you could always just ask your users to change their username to their realname. you would find out real quick if your idea is good for them or not.

Well, i'm actually kinda using the site in a weird way. I'm the RA for a floor in the building and I was approached to make a cheap/quick/easy (not to insult geeklog) website. Now, the residents don't get accounts, they can only post as guests and see news from everyone else. Only other RA's get accounts and none of them would notice a difference if it showed their real names rather than login names. Changing their login names to match their real names also wouldn't work well since one is seperated by a space and the other doesn't allow spaces.

Everyone here knows what their RA's real names are but no one here really could tell who Admin is without me posting my name on every post. Granted I could put it in my signature but i'm looking to hack this and not just find the easiest way around it.

Spaces work just fine in the username (despite that warning in the Admin's user editor), but they are restricted to only 16 characters ...

bye, Dirk

I still rather not tell everyone that their username has to be changed if I can just modify a little php and viola. I really was just hoping for someone to say "Here use this snippet of code".

It really suprises me that no one has done this or knows how to do this. Any way I can get ahold of the author of the forums plugin? He may know.

blaine over at portalparts.com is one of the developers. I'm sure if you post there someone will guide you to the right snippet. Your issue does sound familiar though... did you search this forum very much or the portalparts forum?

I did search this one but i was too stupid or lazy (multiple choice question) to find out the author/authors website. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Mikez0r,

Have you figured this out yet? I'm just starting to look into the forum code to see what I can do, but I figured that I'd check here before diving in. I'll be able to figure it out, but I was hoping that someone would have a shortcut.

I'm doing this on my family's site, one that isn't open to the public, so usernames are used just for logging in. I have all instances where the username is displayed, changed to first (fullname in the users table) and last name (added field in users table). But I have yet to do the forums, which I'm starting on this week.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'll post where to change the code here to help anyone else wanting to do this as well.

Ok, pretty simple, but there is a catch. When a user creates a topic, their username is entered into the name field in the forum_topic table. If you have a lot of posts in your forum, you may not want to go in and change every one, but changing the username to their full name is all you need to do for the old posts. (At least as far as I can tell anyway, I really haven't spent a lot of time testing.)

As for new posts, edit createtopic.php with the following:

Around line 419 (on my version anyway) you'll find this:

Change $_USER['username'] to $_USER['fullname']

Then in line 623 (again on my version), where this code is:

Either add fullname, or change username to fullname. I added it in mine, so I haven't tested it without username, though I would assume that it will work.

Good luck