Make Organization and User share a namespace

[lorenzleutgeb]

Currently, there could be a User with the same name as an Organization. That's bad, as we want to have URLs like example.com/<name> for both types. Again, drawing the parallel to GitHub, where a nickname can be basically anything.

Also, we might at some point need a way to reference a "named identity" (or however you want to call it) which is something that can be referred to via nickname.

[lorenzleutgeb]

Looking at the OrganizationMember class it currently refers to a user only. When sharing namespaces and additionally wrapping this with a "named entity" thing, we could make this transparent, therefore have organizations being member of other organizations.

[victorbalan]

well...it will be smth like example.com/user/<name> and example.com/company/<name>

[lorenzleutgeb]

My premise was

we want to have URLs like example.com/<name> for both types

There's not really a solid reason for it, but it makes things easier (mentions, for example). What's your argument against sharing namespaces, except that it is not implemented yet?

[victorbalan]

i think it is cleaner without shared namespaces

[lorenzleutgeb]

But then having a name get's kind of weird. You cannot say @victorbalan anymore, but something like @user/victorbalan all the time. Also, we end up with the vulnerability that users can choose usernames that are equal to the name of an (already registered!) company.

[Exordian]

Why should i mention a whole company? Who should receive the notification? One can not login with a company, so there is no vulnerability in my opinion

[lorenzleutgeb]

Currently there I don't see a reason to mention a company, but if we ever want to have that feature, we should switch now. On GitHub, teams like @coduno/developers can be mentioned, which seems nice, and stuff like @<kind>/<name> would look very odd.

The fact that we cannot log in as a company, does not buy us anything. The issue is, that a regular person can go ahead and register an account that has the same name as an already registered company. This could turn out to be confusing to other users. For example, you do a challenge for company "xyz", and there is a user account called "xyz" that messages you and impersonates the company. This is indeed confusing, therefore I want to make names (whatever they name) unique. Of course I know that messaging is in no way implemented, but this might make my point clearer.

[lorenzleutgeb]

As a first step, I created CanonicalEntity.