Adding Bio - Your Profile

Feature Proposal
1

Is it possible to allow adding Bio without providing Your Name?

2

Hello :wave:,
yes, go to Settings and click/tap on ā€œEdit Profileā€.

4

No, it doesnā€™t work. The app forces me to add name. - ā€œPlease enter a nameā€
Delta Chat 1.46.13

5

I just tried it and youā€™re right. It doesnā€™t work in DC-Android, but it does in DC-iOS and DC-Desktop. However, the recipients will still see the name, unless they are new contacts.

6

note, that you can enter whatever you like as the name - there is no need to enter your real name.

in general, enforced name or pseudonym is on purpose. see Android v1.46.5 forces a profile name Ā· Issue #3160 Ā· deltachat/deltachat-android Ā· GitHub for some reasoning:

the profile name is the most important information others see when you contact them, it is not nice if that is blank for lots of users.

this is not only a personal decision: it would make groups much harder to read and to follow for all participants.

this is even more true when considering chatmail and randomised email addresses.

note that you can enter whatever you like here, there is no need to enter you real name. just something. at best somethings that help ppl to realise who you are, of course.

for these reasons, we enforce setting a name during onboarding

EDIT: the email address in Delta Chat is far more tuned down than in classic email programs. not specifying a name is comparable with WhatsApp usage with ppl not being in the address book - you end up in guessing who is who ā€¦ same would be with chatmail addresses

so, the name is really the one data point that is reliably visible to others.

on later editing, enforcing is done on android only, iOS and desktop have issues for that

as an alternative, if you really want to set your display name to be just your email address, which is not recommended, you can set the name to your email address that way the field will not be empty

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7

Itā€™s obviously not a solution to lecture people what the should do. The topic is not solved.

ā€œthe profile name is the most important information others see when you contact them, it is not nice if that is blank for lots of users.ā€

I have been using Delta Chat w/o ā€˜nameā€™ and my contacts have no problem with that.

Do you need ā€œnameā€ in e-mail client? No, you donā€™t need to use any name.

Why does DeltaChat try to be worse?

Currently Iā€™ve noticed that you remove what worked -

  • ā€œshare qr codeā€ as image - what was the problem for devs to maintain that?
  • I see that now you will force to establish name.

Itā€™s a weird approach.

8

You can put a space there if you donā€™t want to have a name. I think the main reason for forcing the profile name is so that people donā€™t forget to do so, otherwise they will obviously. Itā€™s not so difficult to specify your name only once when onboarding. But i agree that it should be more clear how to skip this step, maybe a grayed-out hint (put space here for having no name) would be helpful.

9

well, as explained and reasoned above, we do not want to give the option to skip that step :slight_smile:

while it is understandable that the expectation here may be different for some people, many people use Delta Chat without even knowing that they have an email address or write to some.

we want to have these users a nice experience as well, with as few pitfalls as possible.

(imagine this forum thread, if we would read some large numbers, all of same length, instead of @pichsi, @Raiden, @iequidoo ā€¦ maybe one can create a forum account with no name or a whitespace as well, but if many people do, it is not nice. therefore handles or names are enforced here and there, and it is usually not considered a big deal)

10

I saw some people that put random stuff e.g. from pwgen into name because they donā€™t want a specific one. This is not much better than a chatmail address. At the same time, they set an avatar and say that this is what makes them recognisable.

I think putting the email address into name still may be useful, in this case Core should generate a more lightweight From header, i.e. not Alice <alice@example.org>, but just the address, and that may be added to FAQ so that users may be directed there if this question appears again.

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