Email notifications

meta
1

I’m not sure, but this may be a case of Google getting too pervasive.

In the past 24 hours, a couple of the email notifications have shown up in my (gmail) inbox as being from the last poster on a thread. This isn’t out of the ordinary - the email address it si coming from has not changed, just the name of the sender changes.

What has changed in the past 24 is that the name of the sender is being displayed not as the username on the forum, but in the real name of the last person who posted to the thread.

I now know the first names of two members of the forum, and the middle initial and last name of one of them.

Is this Postasaurus’ doing, or is Gmail substituting the known names of the posters?

2

I noticed something similar a few days ago. When the email came from Lord Teshima, I was WTF? But it didn’t include anything that wasn’t already visible in the discourse profile.

3

I’ve seen it too, but I’m not sure where the name is coming from. @Woodman’s real name is coming through on notifications for his replies, but looking at his profile here I see the same name there. Are my replies coming through as dakboy or my real name (don’t doxx me, bro!)?

@ClockWorkXon, my guess is that the name is coming from your Discourse profile, not GMail doing anything nefarious. Of course, if you use your Google account to authenticate here and don’t fix up your profile to hide your name here, your “real” name (as listed by Google, anyway) will show through.

4

I haven’t received any forum emails since Friday, so I don’t know, but I’m curious, too. CWX?

5

While I’m not hiding my identity, I didn’t think that my name would show up anywhere. I don’t believe I’ve posted anything actionable, and since an awful lot of it has been at work it’s not like I don’t expect them to be able to see it anyway, but that was an oversight on my part.

6

@RoadRunner, the name on the email that I got from your reply matched the name showing under “RoadRunner” on your profile. I think that’s the smoking gun.

7

What’s showing up on my replies, I wonder?

As far as my Discourse ID, I believe this is the only one I have…

8

I got an email from ClockworkXon, with a lower case “w” just like in your profile.

Also, peeking in profiles, I noticed that @Woodman has a new name, which also shows up in the autofill list when you tag someone by typing @ and a couple letters of their handle. Interesting feature?

9

Who’s that?

^runs away^

10

Don’t ask me why I was concerned. I haven’t said anything that I wouldn’t own up to in a heartbeat if asked.

11

Haha, yeah, but I recognized it this time. :wink:

Dude, no worries. I noticed and thought it was odd, too. Probably something that kicked in with a discourse update.

12

It’s good to know; even if you aren’t worried about it, someone else might be. Thanks for pointing that out.

13

Sorry, I guess I should clarify “no worries.” I meant that CWX is free to keep his reasoning to himself. It isn’t necessarily anyone else’s business.

14

Looks like they added a “show real name in notification emails” setting…and had it on by default.

/facepalm

15

Ding, ding ding!

Looks like @RoadRunner gets the prize, for being the first to guess correctly! Let’s give him a big round of applause!

Tell our studio audience what he’s won, Jimmy!

16

And I see that email notifications have changed subjects as well. They are no coming through as “[%thread name%] [%category name%] %subject%”.