Hello,
my problem is that my real name is displayed instead of my screen name.
Can someone help me with this.

You can change your name by going to your "control panel", accessible via the dark box with your name and the little blue dotted triangle in the upper right hand corner.

DhO displays your real name, instead of your login name; the reasoning being, we're all adult people around here, it's not compulsory to use your real name. Just type something other than your real name into the control panel if you want to stay anonymous.

Cheers,
Florian

My real name is "W.T.S. Tarver" (on my driver's license, etc.) but I want the displayed name to be "Tarver".

"W.T.S." is a placeholder, the initials of a Polish name unpronounceable to most Anglophones -- long story, including a nickname I picked up long ago, a legal name change, etc. -- but the upshot is that I go by the one name "Tarver" in as much of my life as possible. Everybody who knows me calls me "Tarver" (unless you speak Polish).

Problem here is that the DhO control panel won't let me enter a blank field for the "first name", or use the "display name".

I have this conversation every once in a while -- had to get custom tech support on Facebook, for example, to get my name rendered correctly. This glitch isn't fatal, it just misleads people into thinking that "WTS" is my first name which though technically true, is not semantically correct in my case. As an unintended side effect, I can always tell that anyone who calls me "WTS" or Mr. Tarver is following normal social convention but has very probably never met me in person.

Sorry for being terminally unique, but there it is.

--Tarver

You could enter "Tarver" as First Name and "." as Last Name... or "." as First Name and "Tarver" as Last Name.

Or maybe "Tar" as first name and "ver" as last name... would look like this: "Tar ver"... maybe kinda weird though.

Tried that. Fail. My favorite workaround is using a single space character for the "first name" field and this used to work surprisingly often 10 or 15 years ago, but data validation scripts have been getting better over the years, and this works less often than it used to. What looks to the database administrator like beautiful normalization looks to me like technocratic oppression of the subtle individuality that is me. But then I am the one who decided to adopt an atypical syntax for my name, and then I went and worked in the software industry for a solid decade to soak in the full horror of what I had gone and done, so all of this is wonderfully close to my shadows and yet another brilliant opportunity to appreciate the Three Characteristics in all things.

Maybe you can try one of the unicode space characters? (Copy + Paste the space from this this site.)

Ummm. LOL

Hmm, now I've changed my name, but for some reason every time I make a change to my account I have to change my password. Weird.

It worked! Behold the amazing power of emptiness! I am now:

U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE foobar No width (the character is invisible)

Hehe... total hax, just my kind of thing. Grats!

Heh heh heh...

Tweaked it so that first and last names are weird spaces, and the middle name is "real" so that it displays with a nicely centered oversize underline.

OK, I have now spent enough time on this, so I will now use some of that fabulous mental discipline I have been cultivating to get on with something else...

A funny side-effect is that in the list of potential addressees in the Messages interface, my name is now sorted in first place. Would that I could hack my own mind as easily... or maybe that's what I am doing here, after all...

It does beg the question - why is there a "screen name" field?

Is it just an artifact of the software that's being used for DhO, and admin has set things up so that field is not actually used?

Apparently, yes. I forget which Sutta it was in, where the Buddha tells Ananda that the Bhikkhu who develops equanimity with wrongly configured message boards is very close to awakening.