Use two character initials instead of three character initials

[anotherritstudent]

I've see a few petitions and counter petitions pop up from time to time. And there was one more recently about a disputed issue. In the "Signed By" section I can see columns of initials of the students who agree with the petition. Some of these are two character initials, but many are three initial ones.

I'm asking that a patch be made that will only show two character (or one even just one character) initials. I can infer the idea behind showing just the initials was just to give some anonymity to those who signed it. But the problem is that I can easily just pop those initials into the RIT gmail and get some names, thus destroying any anonymity. There are some people who's three letter initials are unique in the student body.

Doing this change would ensure that whoever signs any petition will have better privacy in that decision.

[petermikitsh]

I'm no longer a core contributor here, but I could speak to the work involved, if core contributors elect to pick up this issue. Hiding middle initials on-screen would only be so beneficial. The existing dataset contains the middle initial and is accessible via the API.

• Create a migration to edit all Post and User objects and strip out middle initials.
• Modify the ldap integration implementation to strip out the middle initial on logins.

[NathanCastle]

This will be added to the list of work to do. Note that the SG Services Team is working on several projects in addition to PawPrints, so it may be a while before this can be implemented.

Thank you for your use of PawPrints and your helpful feature request.

If you are interested in working on this issue, we do accept pull requests. :)

[ceko]

This doesn't exactly address the suggestion, but I made initials editable with this pull request: #84

We only store middle initial in that field, so it wasn't very useful for us.