I’m looking for a way to automatically generate (amusing if possible) aliases for users, to minimise the amount of thought they have to put into filling in a form, and keep their real name private.
I’ve been googling around for “user alias generator library php” and similar, but all I’m finding are online generators, no code examples, data sets or libraries. My google-fu seems weak tonight.
Can anyone point me towards some suitable references? Does such a thing exist?
I still can’t see how to edit a post, can you edit once posted?
Anyway I wanted to add, for the sake of clarity, it’s something like this I’m looking to do…
You only have 30 minutes after you post to edit your post. It’s been 9 hours 
. Look for this button to edit…
Ahh gotcha, thanks!
I did some more research today, I came across Markov chains and initially I thought I’d found what I was after, however thinking about it a bit more, if all these name generators are using Markov chains, the input texts must be pretty weird and especially constructed, and I can’t find any information about that.
So I think Markov chains might be a red herring. Any thoughts?
Let me explain exactly what I’m trying to do.
I have a form where people enter events, they quickly fill in their real name and email address, and then as things stand their real name is then listed in the entrants list. Basically I want there to be a real name and an alias, the real name is only known to the page administrator but the alias is publicly displayed.
Now I could simply ask for them to optionally input an alias, if they don’t want their real name shown on the public entrants list, but that increases the number of input fields on the form by 50%, and even though one of them is optional, I really think a better solution would be for me to auto-generate the aliases.
Many of these funny name generators generate the same output from the same input. That’s exactly what I’d like.
But I’m buggered if I can work out how the heck they are doing this. There are SO many of these sites, I don’t believe they’ve all implemented the same code, there Must be a library or some original article describing the method of doing this, and no matter how much I search I’m not finding that…
You might build your own version by searching for unique names from sites like http://nameberry.com then putting these into an array or several arrays sorted by gender / first and last names. Based of the real name you could pick out a random name or names from these. Anyway, its a thought.
Yeah the more I think about this the more I think I may be overthinking this. I just need a big list of pirate first names, pirate last names and pirate middle names, and stick 'em together randomly!
That’s exactly what you need to do, IMO. I wrote a similar system for a dynamic site slogan. Each page load had at the top:
“Come for the x, stay for the y.” and I populated a database of words that could be selected from for each variable, giving the user something funny to see on each page load:
“Come for the honeybadgers, stay for the monobrows.”
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