What naming conventions for usernames do you use?

[Protec]

Just curious, what do you use for the naming convention for usernames of users? Edited September 13, 2021 by Protec

[DrCheese]

Year they started secondary Surname First initial

 

eg

 

This years year 7 is 21SmithB (For bob smith)

 

If more than 1 with the same setup, one of them gets a "1" after their name.

[3s-gtech]

We use a completely unrelated year group identifying word, followed by a sequential number for each user. It’s designed to be anonymous, yet easy to remember for the students. No PI at all held in their usernames/email addresses that way.

 

The usernames are in SIMS as a UDF for staff to look up.

[hardtailstar]

Year they started secondary Surname First initial

 

eg

 

This years year 7 is 21SmithB (For bob smith)

 

If more than 1 with the same setup, one of them gets a "1" after their name.

Same but it if two B Smith's then it's full name

 

21SmithBob

 

21SmithBill

 

If by chance there are two Bob Smith's then we use the first letter of middle name.

[jthompson]

{cohort intake year (2 digits)}{legal surname (12 chars)}{legal forename (1 char)}{admission number (last 2 chars)}

 

The addition of the admission number characters means that name clashes within a cohort are highly unlikely to lead to having to break from the convention.

 

There's an argument for not including names in student usernames, but we find it helpful in lots of ways. It's hard to see how you could get away with not having the students' names in the display names for their accounts anyway.

[Danp]

The joys of having a small school, first initial and surname@ (jbloggs@)

[jmak]

One thing I learned the hard way was too remove any non-alphanumeric characters, i.e apostrophes as in O'Toole and hyphens from double barreled names. I generated usernames from a SIMS report so a few creepy through and it was much more straightforward to have a consistent rule.

[Chaniel]

{2 Digit Intake Year}{First 4 of Legal Surname}{First 1 of Legal Forename}{Unique Number}

 

That Unique number will usually be just "1" and it gets incremented if there are duplicates.

 

E.g. John and Jane Smith will be 21SmitJ1 and 21SmitJ2 respectively. Hyphens or apostrophes are removed from usernames.

[msi_school]

Our usernames are {2 Digit Intake Year}{First 1 of Legal Forename}{Legal Surname}{number to avoid collision if required}

 

Things I have learnt over the years setting up usernames:

Drop non alphabetical characters such as apostrophes, hyphens or spaces

Drop any accents on users names such as ö becomes o

Truncate usernames at 20 characters max 10 is better

Use the cohort intake year not the student's start year

 

It doesn't matter if you use legal or preferred names it will cause confusion so go with legal

 

Whatever you do someone will not be happy so I love @3s-gtech policy

[jthompson]

I leave hypens and apostrophes in, as I've never encountered them breaking anything and it's part of their name, but will check for and remove any spaces in names, since that does break stuff.

[mrbios]

Students follow:

10JBL2512

 

Year of birth

First letter first name

First two letters surname

Date of birth

Month of birth

 

It's quite irritating, but it's been that way for ~20 years, so I'm reluctant to change it

 

Staff are just firstnamelastname.

[elsiegee40]

Students follow:

10JBL2512

 

Year of birth

First letter first name

First two letters surname

Date of birth

Month of birth

 

It's quite irritating, but it's been that way for ~20 years, so I'm reluctant to change it

 

Staff are just firstnamelastname.

 

I don’t like have their full DoB in the login…

[stevec_]

Username format:

{cohort intake year}{first 4 characters of last name}{first 2 characters of first name}

e.g. 21bloggjo

Incrementing numbers suffixed for duplicate usernames. All punctuation is removed from first/last name.

 

Email format:

{first name}.{last name}@school...

All punctuation except for hyphens are removed.

[David44]

It doesn't matter if you use legal or preferred names it will cause confusion so go with legal

Whatever you do someone will not be happy so I love @3s-gtech policy

 

Always go with the preferred name surely as that is the name they prefer, the clue is in the description. If someone doesn't like it they can change their preferred name, not so simple to change a legal name. You might also end up deadnaming someone.

 

It makes me wonder, what is the point in even collecting their preferred name if you are not going to use it in something as fundamental as their username/email address?

[mdrabble]

Naming conventions was already in place when I arrived many moons ago.

 

Students

Year of intake + Initial of first name + first 5 characters of last name

 

Jenny Johnson in Year 7 = 21JJohns

 

Staff

Initial + Full Last name

 

John Smith = JSmith

Edited September 14, 2021 by mdrabble

[mrbios]

I don’t like have their full DoB in the login…

 

I've never been a fan. When GDPR came in i questioned it with the DPO but he was happy. Only consideration the school have made about changing it over the last few years was down to how annoying it was in teams, but then we changed their display names from username to full name and they forgot about that too.

 

I might try and change it next year, though i can only see that being a future change rather than rolling it back to all existing pupils.

[clareq]

We use admission number (stripping out leading zeros) and initials of preferred name for students, initial.surname for staff, with a number if we have a clash.

[Davit2005]

Used a combination of firstname surname letters and the intake year based on the year they would of started in year 7 of secondary. This was about 10 years back when I worked in a secondary. But it kept it fairly straight forward when it came to AD etc. Edited September 14, 2021 by Davit2005

[Jawloms]

Surname, Initial, year they would have joined year 7.

 

bloggsj21

[msi_school]

Always go with the preferred name surely as that is the name they prefer, the clue is in the description. If someone doesn't like it they can change their preferred name, not so simple to change a legal name. You might also end up deadnaming someone.

 

It makes me wonder, what is the point in even collecting their preferred name if you are not going to use it in something as fundamental as their username/email address?

 

I hadn't considered deadnameing and I should have, this backs up my opinion that a policy such as @3s-gtech or @Claireq is the best way forwards. A username is an identifier for the computer not a declaration of a person's name and a anonymous unique identifier is a far more elegant solution we can change display names and email aliases without affecting the underlying account

 

The reason we stick with legal names is that with the increase of SSO and links between systems changing a username can become an involved and disruptive process. I have seen preferred names changed several times over the course of a students time in school.

 

I think it is time to review this policy.

.

[Protec]

I have seen usernames with apostrophes glitch Microsoft forms as it can't seem to display them properly and it results in random characters where the apostrophe should be.

[jthompson]

I hadn't considered deadnameing and I should have, this backs up my opinion that a policy such as @3s-gtech or @Claireq is the best way forwards. A username is an identifier for the computer not a declaration of a person's name and a anonymous unique identifier is a far more elegant solution we can change display names and email aliases without affecting the underlying account

 

The reason we stick with legal names is that with the increase of SSO and links between systems changing a username can become an involved and disruptive process. I have seen preferred names changed several times over the course of a students time in school.

 

I think it is time to review this policy.

.

 

Name changes for students seem increasingly common to me. The number of trans students wanting to go by a new name has increased noticeably here in recent years, and being able to update their account name usually means the world to them. So yes, deadnaming is something to avoid, and reasonably easy to do so. It's worth documenting a workflow for changing a user's name: it's one of those things that's simple, but needs a checklist to work from all the same.

[msi_school]

Name changes for students seem increasingly common to me. The number of trans students wanting to go by a new name has increased noticeably here in recent years, and being able to update their account name usually means the world to them. So yes, deadnaming is something to avoid, and reasonably easy to do so. It's worth documenting a workflow for changing a user's name: it's one of those things that's simple, but needs a checklist to work from all the same.

 

This is all the more reason for moving to a policy of unique identifiers rather than using the students name.

[Oaktech]

We use intake year, chosen first name last intial. So 21JoeB

 

We have a few trans students at one of my schools and we just update username and email to new names. We treat it exactly the same as students adopted from care with a new name and or having a surname changed after a court decision.

[Garacesh]

Almost the same as everyone else's, only we put the number at the end, so Surname, First initial, Year of entry (assuming that they started in year 7 if they join us late) e.g. BloggsJ21

 

I just dump a report from SIMS and feed that CSV to a script that does it all for me, flags up any username collisions, and I just use the next character of their name (so let's say we had Joe and Jon Bloggs, whoever was first in the list would get BloggsJ21, and whoever was second would get BloggsJo21).. I'd prefer to use middle names, but they're basically never recorded in our SIMS.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Garacesh