Your username

Signing up with email and password asks for two things: an email address and a password. It does not ask you to invent a username. You get one anyway, derived from your email address, and you can change it whenever you like.

Where the default comes from #

We take the part of your email address before the @ and tidy it into a legal handle: lowercased, with ., + and spaces turned into underscores, anything outside letters/numbers/underscore/hyphen dropped, and the result trimmed to 20 characters. So Ada.Lovelace+news@example.com becomes ada_lovelace_news.

If that handle is already taken by another account, we add a short random suffix rather than making you pick again. Signing up with GitHub or Google works the same way, except your provider display name is tried first.

Nothing about this is permanent. It exists so the account has a handle on day one, not because we think we picked well.

Changing it #

Open Settings → Account Information and click Change next to your username.

The rules:

• 3 to 32 characters.
• Letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens only.
• It has to be free. If someone else already holds it, you'll be told so and nothing changes.

What it's used for #

Two things:

• Display. It appears in the navigation bar, and team members you share a workspace with can see it alongside your email address.
• Signing in. The credentials form takes either your username or your email address. Both work, so renaming yourself never locks you out, and you can always sign in with your email if you've forgotten what your handle is.

It is not part of any URL, it is never shared with a third party, and it is deleted with your account. See Privacy & data for the full list of what we store.