Hey
I am rebuilding my system and have to decide whether to make user create a username or just make them use their email address as a username.
I’m thinking email address as they will not forget that and if they change email addresses they will hopefully remember to update it.
What do you think? Choose a username or make your email address the username?
Thanks for your comments.
mrmbarnes
A lot of sites make you choose a username but let you log in with either email or username.
It’s easy for the user, but it also gives them a single identity that won’t change even if they change their email.
And a lot of people don’t feel comfortable exposing their email address to the world.
True, email filtering is a lot better than it was years ago, but getting an inbox full of SPAM is no fun if it doesn’t get sent to the Trash automatically.
What happens when two people share an email address (I see this a lot with members of a club I belong to where a family might only have the one email address between them).?
What happens when someone changes their email address?
Having a unique value associated with an account that is not the email address provides ways of making the lost password facility more secure.
it is user friendly to use both.
Regardless of which you choose, be sure to make the login case-insensitive.
That is one of my pet peeves; a ‘username’ should not be case-sensitive and a ‘password’ ABSOLUTELY must!
It was rumored, that some very large bank (which I refrain from naming) does not enforce case-sensitivity on their users’ passwords. I think that is insanely insecure and simply stupid.