[LON-CAPA-users] unique usernames and discussion board

[Michael Dubson]

We are new to lon-capa, implementing it here at U.Colorado Boulder for the 
first this fall.  At CU, the student ID is the student's social security 
number, which must be kept private of course.  We cannot figure out how to 
assign a unique username to all 1000 students in the system, so we made 
their student ID both the username and the initial password.  The problem 
with this is that when students post a discussion, their username/SS# is 
displayed, unless they post anonymously.

How do other schools handle this problem?  English names are never unique, 
so how does one assign unique usernames?

Is there anyway to turn off non-anonymous discussion, so that only 
anonymous discussion is allowed?

Is there any other way around this problem that we haven't thought of?

This issue would be very urgent except for the fact that discussion is 
broken (in the latest version) and we haven't yet implemented the fix.

-thanks in advance, Mike Dubson

Michael Dubson, Senior Instructor
Dept. of Physics
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309

phone: (303)492-4938
FAX: (303)492-3352
email: dubson@spot.colorado.edu
homepage: http://spot.colorado.edu/~dubson/