Tilde survey

Between 17.00 2011-05-25 and 17.00 2011-05-26 UTC, we ran a survey asking:

Which do you prefer?

Option A

Option B

Result: Option A 23.6%, Option B 76.4%

And:

Which do you prefer?

Option 1

Option 2

Result: Option 1 81.6%, Option 2 18.4%

Conclusion: The majority of respondents preferred the options that did not show a tilde.

Selected comments from respondents

Person picker

"sqiggles are an implementation detail not typically in m mental map of people"

"~ is useless there. Or drop the parenthesis and do it that way: Jonathan Lange ~jml"

"~ denotes home folder and dd.net/~kms/ means web page in kms home folder. For those, who know this, ~jml is confusing. For those, who don't – I guess it's still confusing."

"I do not see an additional value in the ~, I think it is reasonably clear that the latter name is a username."

"Why would you put a ~ in there?"

"The tilde does not convey extra information clearly, unless you are very familiar with a shell prompt."

"~ clearly shows that this is a username"

"People might not understand the ~ in the first one. Isn't the assumption that it's always a team/person and not a project/distro?"

"Show me the email address anyway! It's the most useful UUID of the lot."

"Using the ~ before a name is really only useful when taken out of context. For instance, if I want someone on IRC or a mailing list to go to Jonathan Lange's Launchpad profile, I might refer them to ~jml. On Launchpad itself, there is no need to include the ~, as it is assumed that it is referring to a Launchpad page. Since these are also clearly people, there is no possibility of confusing the names for project names."

Profile page header

"tilde unnecessary"

"I don't much like either. The second is uglier. I'd much rather see nothing or an IRC nick here."

"~ is useless there. Or drop the parenthesis and do it that way: Mark Shuttleworth ~mark"

"Why the ~? Unnecesary and cluttering"

"WTF is the tilde? Nobody outside of nerddom knows that's shorthand for a user account."

"Same reason as before. The username does not contain a "~". I can't even see why this is being considered (I don't mean that as a snarky comment, I'm just confused and it seems like someone is coming at this from a technical stand point)."