NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

On 3/4/2011 2:41 PM, Rob Marscher wrote:
> Some nice thoughts.  Thanks for sharing.
>
> On Mar 4, 2011, at 2:30 PM, Gary Mort wrote:
>> Get rid of 2 of them.  And the one that makes the most sense to keep is username.
> There's probably some sites where people don't even want to bother creating a username and just use an email address.

In that case, email address is the username.  :-)  Username for the 
database is just some transitory unique value used to identify an 
individual.

The thing is, once you start really really thinking like that, there are 
all sorts of hackish things you can stop doing.  For example, everyone 
who visits the website is automatically assigned a 'username' and while 
you still treat them as anonymous, you let them do many things on the 
website a normal user can do[make comments, put stuff in carts, 
etc]...you just don't finalize/publish that stuff.

Then when they "logon", you just merge their two accounts.  Their phony 
username is registered to the aka database, and everything they did can 
become 'live'.