Updates to member page urls and ‘mention’ names

I’ve just made some changes so that the urls of member pages now use users’ first names and last names joined together, instead of their login username.

This was because for students, the username is the student ID, and we don’t want to display that next to the user’s real name.

So while your profile page might have been at http://myblog.arts.ac.uk/members/xyz24681012/, it would now be at http://myblog.arts.ac.uk/members/johnsmith/

This also affects the “mentions” functionality, which is like Twitter – you can make a reference to another user in a post using a tag, like @johnsmith. These tags now use firstname+secondname, instead of login username.

If there are multiple users with the same name, their tags will have a number on the end, e.g. johnsmith, johnsmith-1, johnsmith-2, etc.

You shouldn’t be affected by any of this unless you have sent or stored a link to a member’s page, or given them a “mention”. In those cases, you will need to update your links and mentions.

EDIT: I have switched off @mentions for the moment – there’s a little bit more work to be done to get this working with the new name scheme.