Barry Warsaw writes:
Further, I have a strong personal preference for "no user names", or alternatively, using email addresses as their "user name". I think user names are essentially contrived extra information for which there's no need, when clearly your identity is your email address.
Clearly that's *an* identity, yes, and for social and volunteer sites it's one of the few things that is operationally verifiable for most users (except for those wonderfully expressive and mnemonic, not to mention easy-to-type, PGP keys!), so some email address should be the "main" user identifier. OTOH I don't see why a person having an (optional, additional) nickname is bad.
We've long debated, but never attempted, a "centralized user database" component, partly because we can't decide whether that should be a separate piece that the core, Postorius, and HK (and at some point, mailmania) talk to, or whether it should just live in the core.
Another problem is Mailman in the enterprise, which probably has its own database already.