Username Policy

Everyone is welcome to view the contents of the Open Foresight Hub. However, everything else requires registration, including joining the discussions, creating and editing pages.

When registering for an account, you will be asked to choose a ‘real name’ and a ‘username’. We recommend that users use the name they are known by personally and/or professionally on Open Foresight Hub, but your username can be virtually anything you’d like as long as it is truthful, appropriate, represents you as an individual person, and supports a positive editing environment.

When registering for an account, you’ll be asked to create a username and a “real name.” Your real name should be what you are known as personally and/or professionally. It is used in your signature and on discussion posts. Your real name can be changed at any time by clicking “update profile” in the top right menu.

Your username is unique to you. If a desired username is already taken, you will not be able to register using it. Usernames are used in tracking edits to the wiki, appearing in recent changes, old revisions, and last modified.

Additionally, usernames are used in user pages. On your first log in, a page will be generated using your username in the userspace e.g. user:elizabethherfel. You are the only person who can edit this page, and you can customize it to provide relevant information about yourself to other users within the Open Foresight Hub. Additionally, the editor notes page at editor_notes:user:your_username is a page other users can post on to contact you.

Your username can be virtually any string of characters, subject to a few technical limitations. However, it should be a name which other users will be comfortable with and which does not interfere with the project. A controversial name may give a bad impression to other users, and avoiding this is in your own interest. Any usernames deemed offensive may be removed.

• Your username must be unique to you. You will not be able to register with a username that is already taken.
• Allowed characters are the 26 letters of the English alphabet, numbers, and the “special characters” dot . hyphen - and underscore _. All other special characters (i.e. other than letters and digits – whitespace, plus, slash, percent, etc.) will convert to underscore _. Usernames are not case sensitive, any capitalization will convert to lowercase.
• Local and accented characters are converted to their descriptive equivalents (ü becomes ue) or deaccented versions (á becomes a).

To provide greater accountability when creating a registered user account, while not required, we recommend that you use your professional or “in real life” name for your username. By default, your username appears in the edit history for any page you edit. This describes certain types of usernames that are specifically disallowed, primarily because they can be considered offensive, misleading, promotional, or imply that the account does not belong to an individual. Usernames are not allowed if they:

• Contain the names of companies, organizations, websites, teams, clubs, creative groups, or organized events
• Describe a particular role, title, position, department, or a group or team of people within a parent organization or group that can be represented or held by multiple people or by different people e.g. ABCmarketing
• Are promotional in nature, or appear intended to advertise, promote, sell, gain support, or increase the attention or user-base audience of any person, company, market, product, channel, website, or other good or service
• Imply that your user account will be shared between more than one person.

Usernames will be immediately blocked upon discovery and are not to be recreated for the given user if they:

• Are offensive, profane, violent, threatening, sexually explicit, or disruptive, or that advocate or encourage any such behavior (including criminal or illegal acts)
• Contain statements that are libelous, contentious, or disparaging, or that disclose any private or non-public information about somebody else, regardless of whether or not they’re an Open Foresight Hub user.
• Are deliberately deceptive, confusing, misleading, unnecessarily long, similar to the username of other accounts, or attempt to impersonate or falsely represent somebody else (another editor, a notable living person, an “official” Open Foresight Hub account, etc.) in bad faith
• Imply that the account has explicit ownership of any articles, content, or topic areas, or any kind of “power” or “authority” over other editors, imply that certain policies do not apply to them, or that the account has any administrative or “moderator” access levels or user rights
• Imply the intent to troll, vandalize, disrupt, advertise, or spam the Open Foresight Hub
• Imply the intent to personally attack, harass, or threaten other users
• Imply that you will use Open Foresight Hub for purposes that it is not created for

A request to change a given username and a reason for the change can be sent to admin@openforesighthub.org for review. Write ‘username change request’ in the subject line of the email. The email must include the current username, real name, email associated with the account, and the new username being requested.

Once a decision is made to accept the name change, notice will be sent to the user and the name change will be accomplished within 48 hours of notice of approval. You will receive email notice of the change and will thereafter need to login under the new username.

Contributions made under the previous username will not be re-attributed to the new username. Your password for the new username will be the same as for the previous username. Because old edits cannot be reattributed to a new username, please choose your username carefully. If you are concerned about using your real name online for any reason, please don’t. Although we recommend using the name you go by personally/professionally, we respect any user's decision to use a different username.

For example, if Dr. Franz Schröder is your real name, and you choose this to be your username dr.franzschroder, your real name and doctorate will be evident on your edits, on history pages, and (unless you manually change your signature) on all posts, messages, and replies that you make to talk pages and discussions. It is highly recommended that you read and understand the section on using your real name as your username before you decide to do so.

Categories: policy