Apur-ee.313 net.games.trivia utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!davy Sun May 9 13:46:11 1982 What's my Line Results Well, the results are in -- about a week and a half ago, I asked people to send me mail describing the types of login names your site uses, along with any standing rules you may have. I didn't get a lot of responses, but here's a summary of what I did get: cwruecmp last names, although exceptions are allowed duke user's choice - usually initials ima first names, with initials to disambiguate if necessary phs "free-form". Now split 50-50 between initials and first names sii initials, although if someone has a strong preference, it would be honored tucc user's choice - usually initials unc two or three initials, and an occaisional first name utzoo user's choice, except that the name should identify you in some way uwvax student accounts: last names with truncation or initials if needed all other accounts: user's choice common choices are last name or initials (faculty), first name (secretaries & grad students), and special names (warloc, oracle, etc.) (primarily undergrads) watmath person's initials ollowed by their last name, truncation after 12 characters. If there is no middle initial, a "." is used we13 3-character initials wherever possible. In cases of duplication, a new middle initial is chosen Now, so as not to leave our site out, I'll tell you folks what we do. In general, as new students get accounts (about 500 every fall!) they are simply given their user id's as a temporary login. In this way, the accounts can be given out in class, and the students can fill out an information form, which is typed in later. Gradually these logins are changed over to names, usually the person's last name, with initials added for uniqueness. The accounts which have been around for a while (i.e., before this method was used) have somewhat random names, some are initials, some first names, some nicknames. If a person wishes his login changed, he simply has to ask, and in most cases, he shall receive. There has been a big flurry of login changing recently, it seems a lot of people want two letter logins ("jb", "cb", "gb", etc.). We run about a dozen computers on the network, and the biggest problem is that since they are all "hooked together", people must be unique net-wide. We have decided to do this by user id, i.e., no two accounts, regardles of machine, may have the same uid. This seems to work well, and I don't believe there have been any major problems as of yet. Well, thanks to those of you who sent in responses, and if any of you reading this now have any interesting situations with logins to describe, send them to me, and I'll digest them once again. --Dave Curry pur-ee!davy ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.