Motivation

In order to avoid temporary usernames being confused with date-times we may wish to include a prefix that is displayed in front of temporary usernames. This prefix will need to be localizable. Note that this prefix is not a part of the username itself and hence will not be stored in the database. The prefix is simply inserted before the temporary username is going to be displayed on the page.

We are going to be looking into this once we start receiving feedback from community post testwiki/pilot deploy. Hence this is a non-MVP feature request and is marked as Low priority to reflect that.

This idea came up during the discussion on T332805: Decide the prefix character for temporary usernames. Copying relevant comments below:

In T332805#9077934, @Esanders wrote:

I think numeric-only usernames with the year in them are going to be very confusing in signatures where they are shown close to a timestamp, and without the User: prefix:

I note that in the usability study that signatures were not part of the test case, however signatures are one of the main places where usernames are seen on wikis.

In T332805#9078023, @RHo wrote:

In T332805#9077934, @Esanders wrote:

I think numeric-only usernames with the year in them are going to be very confusing in signatures where they are shown close to a timestamp, and without the User: prefix:

I believe this is following overall MVP guidance to have the temp account to be as similar as possible to IP editor, where IP addresses are also a bunch of numbers without "user:" in front of it. However, perhaps if this is considered an issue of confusion, perhaps it could it be amended to add a lexical prefix when used in signatures on Discussion Tools like User:~2023-120?
I think the reason for not including lexical prefix in the actual username in the database is due to it being perceived as somewhat sub-optimal if it is only in English (eg ~2023-Temp12345) for other languages, and complex to localise at the account level?

I note that in the usability study that signatures were not part of the test case, however signatures are one of the main places where usernames are seen on wikis.

This is true, the study was targeted to gauge understanding and main workflows for the unregistered editor, less so for how typically experienced folks would view names on a Talk page.

In T332805#9078065, @Esanders wrote:

perhaps it could it be amended to add a lexical prefix when used in signatures on Discussion Tools like User:~2023-120?

Good idea, @matmarex suggested something almost identical just now in our meeting. The label could be anything (e.g. "Unregistered user ~2023~120"), the benefit of "User:" is that it doesn't require any new messages.

Note that this wouldn't solve the problem in other places that usernames are shown, such as history pages or other logs. They would have to be "fixed" individually if we wanted to add more text for temporary usernames.

In T332805#9078438, @Tchanders wrote:

In T332805#9078065, @Esanders wrote:

perhaps it could it be amended to add a lexical prefix when used in signatures on Discussion Tools like User:~2023-120?

Note that this wouldn't solve the problem in other places that usernames are shown, such as history pages or other logs. They would have to be "fixed" individually if we wanted to add more text for temporary usernames.

It should be straightforward to do this in other places too, via the Linker which already customizes links for temporary user names

In T332805#9079308, @RHo wrote:

In T332805#9078438, @Tchanders wrote:

In T332805#9078065, @Esanders wrote:

perhaps it could it be amended to add a lexical prefix when used in signatures on Discussion Tools like User:~2023-120?

Note that this wouldn't solve the problem in other places that usernames are shown, such as history pages or other logs. They would have to be "fixed" individually if we wanted to add more text for temporary usernames.

It should be straightforward to do this in other places too, via the Linker which already customizes links for temporary user names

Ah this is true. The work to make temp account names displayed to be more easily distinguishable for important patrollers/mods is done already here: T325768: Design the visual look for temp usernames:

Given this is already implemented, would having the name appear like so on Talk pages be enough versus adding on the extra text?

This would be consistent with the way it is displayed in other pages like history and RC, and reduces the need for creating a standard text label before this type of account only.

In T332805#9080637, @Esanders wrote:

In T332805#9079308, @RHo wrote:

In T332805#9078438, @Tchanders wrote:

It should be straightforward to do this in other places too, via the Linker which already customizes links for temporary user names

This is very helpful. It seems there should only be two places we need to change then: Linker and signature generation.

Given this is already implemented, would having the name appear like so on Talk pages be enough versus adding on the extra text?

This would be consistent with the way it is displayed in other pages like history and RC, and reduces the need for creating a standard text label before this type of account only.

This won't happen automatically as signatures just generate plain wikitext links, e.g. [[User:~2023~123|~2023~123]] which are not rendered by the Linker class.

And in order to keep the wikitext output relatively clean, we will likely not want add the CSS class required to render the link with a different background, as we've done in Linker.

In the other direction it should be much more straightforward, i.e. if we agree on a text prefix for signatures (e.g. "Unregistered ~2023~123") then copying that to Linker should be fairly trivial.