0.11.39 — a login that is not a case number

The login handed out at sign-up came from a pattern: the first letter of the address, `_anon`, four digits. That produced `p_anon4720`. The pattern has its virtues — it reveals nothing, it cannot be mistaken for a person's signature, and an account has something to be called from its first second, so the comment form does not refuse over an empty field.

It also has a fault that stays invisible until you look at it as a reader. People open an account in order to say something, and the first comment follows the registration immediately — signed with exactly that. A string of this shape reads like a ticket reference, or an identifier in a system one has ended up inside. Changing the login was always possible, but it took a step that someone writing for the first time will not take first.

From this release an instance can supply its own pool: `community.autoNames`. The engine draws from it, checks whether the name is free, and adds a counter when it is not — `quiet_water`, then `quiet_water_2`. A hundred words run out sooner than they look like they would, so the counter is not decoration but the condition on which the pool keeps working as accounts accumulate.

The words belong to the instance rather than the engine, and that is not an administrative detail. The login is seen by every reader under a comment, it is in the language of the content and it carries the tone of the site — and the engine, by design, knows not one sentence a reader can see. An instance that declares nothing keeps the `_anon` pattern exactly as before; swapping the engine changes nothing for it.

One check has been narrowed. A nickname shaped like an automatically assigned one was forbidden when choosing your own — so that nobody could take someone's future login or pose as a fresh account. The ban still covers only the `_anon` pattern, because only that one looks systemic. A word from the pool is an ordinary string and a reader may choose the same one if it is free; the database looks after that.