Best practice for account usernames? [closed]

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I'm in the middle of creating a user registration for a website and was wondering if it is better to require the username to be an email address or any value for a username?

Example:> Username: me@mail.com or Username: me

In my case it can't be one or the other it has to either be an email address or any other value.

Thanks.

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In your comment, you indicated it was a registration for a job application. In this case, I recommend you use email for a few reasons:

1. The data will be more easily read by the person who's hiring (they don't care to know your super-awesome SN ninjawarrior1337)
2. You can guarantee that you'll collect a valid email (you'll probably want to send emails at some point)
3. Since there's no "social" component, people don't need any kind of nick name, their email will do fine
4. Easy to remember

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Whatever method you chose, give the user the option to change it. The reason being is that email addresses are NOT permanent. Services can go out of business, people can change email providers, etc.

OpenID is great if you allow more than one authentication service per account.

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From personal experience, I find it more convenient when websites use my email address for login, because then I don't have to recall with username I used for this site (I have multiple usernames, depending whether spaces are allowed and depending what kind of website this is).

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Another option is to use OpenID, then users can leverage an existing OpenID to create an account on your site. Here's directions on how to get started: http://openid.net/add-openid/

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At someone's suggestion, I am elevating this from a comment to an answer:

If you use email address, you can share that with other website owners and aggregate personal information about your users. A lot of big websites do this. The tiny percentage of us who know about this won't register on a site that demands our email address, unless we're real comfortable with their privacy policy.

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If you're just talking about convention then it doesn't really matter - pick one and go with it. I personally prefer a username as oppose to an email address since it's quicker to type in and I usually use the same username on multiple sites (but I often have different email addresses.)

However, others will prefer email addresses instead which is just as valid a response!