Support for email addresses as usernames?

Question

We have a database of users that is currently being offered through Crowd. The database doesn't have a concept of "username" - instead email address is the username. We can link this up to JIRA easily, but then our users get their email addresses exposed to the public.

Does anyone have any tips for how we might still use this database of email+password but ask the user for a "nickname" that gets used by JIRA? It would be very similar to how this very Q&A board (answers.atlassian.com) worked when we all signed up: we provided some other credentials (my.atlassian.com) and then were asked to provide a unique nickname just for this particular site.

Thanks!

Patrick

David Yu · Answer

Sorry, I misread your question. The alias is not predictable in your situation. :-(

Patrick Lightbo · Answer

Aliases look promising, but there are a two problems:

* As you point out, it's not able to be determined by the user
* There is no programmatic way to set an alias

Can you explain why you think the alias is predictable? All we have is email, first name, last name, etc. None of those can be used to generate a unique username that our customers are likely to be happy with. Maybe I'm misunderstanding?

David Yu · Answer

How about Crowd Alias?  The creation of the Alias is not done by the user however, but since it's predictable in your situation, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle.