Usernames and display names
Your username is your public name on LibreTimes. It is what appears in your profile address and in mentions, and it is unique across the platform.
Your display name is the name shown in headings, author bylines, and member lists. It is free text, it does not have to be unique, and it can be written differently in different languages.
Most people set the username to something short and the display name to their real name.
| Username | Display name | |
|---|---|---|
| Unique | Yes | No |
| Used in your profile address | Yes | No |
| Character rules | Restricted, see below | Free text |
| Translatable | No | Yes |
| Example | jdoe or john_doe | John Doe / Джон Доу |
Rules for usernames
- Between 3 and 30 characters
- Lowercase letters and digits
- Underscores allowed between them, as a separator
- No capital letters, no spaces, no dashes, no other punctuation
- Some names are reserved and cannot be taken
So john_doe, jdoe, and ada2 are fine. John_Doe (capitals), john-doe
(dash), _john (leading underscore), and john__doe (doubled underscore) are
not.
Dashes are not a stylistic choice we made against – they are reserved for profiles that belong to people without accounts, such as historical figures and authors matched from external databases. Keeping the two sets apart means an account username can never collide with one of those.
Where your username appears
Your profile lives at:
libretimes.io/@yourusernameOther people can mention you as @yourusername in publications and comments.
Signing in
You can sign in with either your username or your email address. They are two ways of naming the same account.
Changing your username
You can change your username from your profile settings, and the new one has to pass the same rules. Links to your old address keep working – they redirect to the new one – so you will not silently break citations of your work.
There is a limit on how often you can do this: once a year. A username that changes constantly is not much of an identifier, and other people's links to you depend on it being reasonably stable.
Changing your username does not change your display name, and it does not affect anything you have published.
Choosing well
Pick something you will still want in five years. Your username is how colleagues find you and how your work gets attributed, and the one-a-year limit means you cannot iterate on it.
Keep it short. It appears in every link to your profile and every mention of you, and a 30-character username is unpleasant to type.