A couple of readers reported a strange ”{name}” bug with the online user list over on the sidebar, so I looked into it. Turns out that ”{name}” was being shown to represent any user who had chosen to login anonymously. Weird thing was, nobody chose that. That’s because I omitted that option from the login form altogether. Problem is, when you omit the checkbox, the form defaults to “anonymous” and thus generates the {name} thing.

Mind you, it shouldn’t really show anything if the user is anonymous; I mean, showing {name} with a link to their profile is kind of stupid. I don’t know why that was happening. It’s not really anonymous at all, it’s more like “Guess the user!” and then you click to find out if you were right. Plus, if you happen to be the user who has logged in anonymously, you would see your actual name printed over there, with an asterisk next to it, but everyone else (including lurkers) would see ”{name}”. Stupid. Anyway, I put the checkbox back onto the form, checked it by default, and hid it. Now everyone who’s logged in will show up, and no one should see ”{name}” anymore.