Just what the title says.
A lot of users on ham.SE (hopefully!) will be amateurs with a legitimate call-sign.
How should they share their call?
Would a dummy-user by the call-sign be acceptable?
EDIT: The proposal isn't mandatory (+: it's meant as a suggestion to use as convention on the site - if the user so desires
I'm opposed to any "forced user naming convention".
If you want to include your callsign in your user name, then you can add it to your displayed name on your profile.
If you only want your callsign in your name on ham.SE, then when you save the edits to your profile, click the Save Profile button instead of the Save and Copy to all Stack Exchange Accounts
I don't think we should say anything at all. I certainly don't think we should have a policy mandating how users display (or not display) their call signs.
Consider: in what situations will it matter? Stack Exchange is supposed to be everything about the quality of the answers, rather than the people answering. If an answer is good, what difference does it make whether or not the answerer has an amateur radio call sign, let alone prominently displays it?
I'll take a high-quality answer from someone who never even considered getting an amateur radio license, even on ham.SE, over a low-quality (but perhaps factually correct as far as what's in it goes) answer any day.
I'm not sure what the problem is?
I go by Andrew on all other SE sites, but here I've edited my display name to include my callsign.
I see no need to compel the use of a callsign, and cannot see any reason why a ham would not want to. But that should be down to individual choice.
Don't forget that established users have the special hover-out user card and a bit of granular control over what it contains. Using the special summary markup, you can have your callsign display prominently in your profile page, as well as the card that expands when someone hovers over your avatar in most places. Just use:
<!-- summary: callsign here, other factoids -->
And then in your profile you can list it as you like. You're also free to make it part or all of your user name, incorporate it in your avatar somehow and probably other creative ideas I've missed.
It's fine to have a way that most people do this, communities tend to establish this kind of consistency without even realizing that they are - but we can't hope to enforce any requirements when it comes to how / if / where it's displayed.
I'd like to see people include their callsigns in their username.
I'm opposed to any sort of formal rule or format.
I put mine in purposefully early on to suggest to others a template they might consider, encouraging them to add theirs. The more people that add their callsign to their username in some way, the more new users will be encouraged to do so simply because it's so common.
But leave it up to the user. The callsign provides a lot of information at a glance, but shouldn't in any way be necessary to participate.
