hexbear

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Now that the old Hexbear fork has been officially abandoned, this community will be used as a space for meta-discussion on the site itself.

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So it seems like people have started noticing Hexbear/Lemmy's "backend" (corpo term) doesn't actually enforce that you have pronouns and that you don't change your username (hexbear.net)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There are a few users on the site without pronouns now (other than "none/use name", I mean like there is no pronoun field at all)

Was considering writing a no-fun-allowed patch for this unless this is intended behavior now? I would have submitted a diff but I can't build lemmy on my system to test any changes :(

It seems like the patch would be pretty easy, there is already pronoun validation code it just needs to be applied when people try to update their username

This seems like a deviation from the path laid out for us by comrade TC69

What do you think?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In this case Hexbear's web UI actually just puts your pronouns in your username (display name is the Lemmy term). All that has to be done is enforce that there are pronouns in your selected username in the server code

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

There is a difference between Username and Display Name. You can't "change" your username and it has different character requirements and is used for authentication. Display Name can be changed at any time using the Default UI and can be what ever you want and is not used for authentication.

Hexbear replaces the text field for Display Name with the pronouns drop down. It then combines your username with your pronouns and saves it in your display name field.

If you have API access you can update your display name to whatever you want because the UI is what enforces the pronouns not the server (as you identified).

The display name is used externally by other instances so it needs to remain compatible for federation. That way pronouns are displayed for users on other instances.

I'm not really sure if you can add validation to the field without breaking external users display names.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It's doesn't seem so difficult to me, we just have to check if local users have valid pronouns (valid in the sense of it's in a list that can be checked by a computer lol, not ideal but yeah) in their requested display name when they try to use the save_user_settings api. According to makotech222 elsewhere in the thread we actually used to have validation like this but the code got lost in an update