Hi Discourse Community,
I hope this message finds you well! I have been exploring ways to enhance user privacy on our Discourse forum, and I came across the idea of hashing usernames in profile URLs.
Currently, profile links are structured like this: https://meta.discourse.org/u/user, which exposes the username directly. I was looking at other forums online and it appears it hashes the profile URL. Not sure how since these forums were unrelated to nor used Discourse so the code is beyond me.
I was wondering if there is a way to hash the username so that the profile URL could be transformed into something more privacy-conscious, such as a Unix timestamp representing when the user joined. For example, instead of the standard URL, it could look something like https://meta.discourse.org/u/1735526984061 (where 1735526984061 is the Unix timestamp in miliseconds).
If hashing usernames in this manner is not currently possible, I would like to encourage someone from the community to consider creating a merge request to implement this feature. It would be a great addition to enhance user privacy and security. I Was unsure as to post this in support or feature as it could go either way.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this!
Best regards,
anon30825280
Discuss this on our forum.