A lil’ bug report here: a while ago I cleared my display name of my profile over on main Trakt, however that change has not yet been propagated to the forum, and there is no way for me to trigger that or to manually change/delete it on here (the concerning section at Preferences → Account cannot be changed, even though it says it’s optional—heh).
Could this behaviour be changed so that Discourse is notified of changes to matching fields on the main site (at the very least one’s display/real name) and takes on the new value?
Edit just to clarify that the value I’m talking about on the main website is the “Display name”—found in the ACCOUNT section of one’s settings
I believe it updates during the single sign on process. This happens occasionally, but not sure how often it actually requires a sign in. You normally won’t even see it since the forums redirect to Trakt, and if you’re signed in, it just redirects right back to forums.
I wonder if loading the forums and signing in from a private browser window will speed up the process?
In that case, could it be that an empty string is being interpreted by Discourse as [do not change]? (Why didn’t I think of that before…)
The emptying of the “Display name” field on trakt.tv happened weeks (maybe months?) ago, by the way, with multiple clean logins since, so that probably isn’t the problem. (Since I had no active presence on those forums before, this issue was no more than a mere nuisance for me—until now.)
To put my theory to the test, I changed my “Display name” on the main website to some gibberish, logged out of the forums and then logged in again. That change was then propagated to my “Real name” on here—as you said it would, @justin.
Then I yet again deleted all the content of my “Display name” (main website), logged out of and in to the forums, and that gibberish string was still my “Real name” (forums).
Thus, the issue is indeed that Discourse only picks up changes to that field when the new value is not empty / equal to "".
Lastly, let’s see what changing my “Display name” to ­ does.
Edit: Alright, that did the trick (for now)—my “Real name” on here is visually empty—but I’d rather simply have that field actually empty.
Good investigation, thanks! My guess is this is something deeper in Discourse where they don’t want a blank name to be sent. I’ll take a look, but not sure we’ll have control to modify that.
I think my display name has an illegal character too so it won’t update. But I don’t mind that it’s different here.
But I like that I could get creative with my display name on Trakt!