Ask HN: Are you exposing users real names with FB Connect?

1 pointkapauldo1 comment

Some of my users want their FB names to be visible only to their FB friends, and to everyone else, they want to appear as an alias. This requires me to do a complicated/expensive friend maintenance, as I have both FB users and non-FB users. Is anyone else dealing with this and if so, how?

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We've looked into it, it's something our project plan. We've got to use accounting to do it, so users can register using their fb accounts and that gets tied together, from then on all users have an alias which is what is displayed as default. But our plan is that once the alias is displayed we do the second request to see if the viewing user is a friend, if they are we update the name... does this make sense?

1) Link account to fb 2) Always assign and display alias 3)Check if viewer is a friend a)if friend update alias to show real name b) is not a friend, don't update!

Good luck working with the facebook api! :P

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