This should accompany a more robust mechanism for creating user names.
At present the head of the email address is used, but this won't scale especially well and doesn't encourage users to choose meaningful user names for themselves. This is important as user names appear in data feed URLs.
It might be better to assign a random user name, then indicate to users that they can change it if they wish. Heroku uses this method when naming new apps.
e.g.
adjective = random.choice([word.strip() for word in open('adjectives.txt')])
animal = random.choice([word.strip() for word in open('animals.txt')])
number = random.randint(1000,9999)
print "%s-%s-%s" % (adjective, animal, number)
This should accompany a more robust mechanism for creating user names.
At present the head of the email address is used, but this won't scale especially well and doesn't encourage users to choose meaningful user names for themselves. This is important as user names appear in data feed URLs.
It might be better to assign a random user name, then indicate to users that they can change it if they wish. Heroku uses this method when naming new apps.
e.g.