Communicate more when org has disabled name changes

[gnprice]

When a user goes into Zulip settings to change their name, but the organization's admins have disabled name changes, they're greeted with a grayed-out text field:

If you look closely there's a little "?" icon, and if you mouse over it and wait, there's a tooltip with reasonably descriptive text:

Changing your name has been disabled by your Zulip organization administrators. Contact an administrator for help.

I think it's pretty easy to miss that, though. And even if you see the text, it leaves it opaque why the org admins would do such a thing, or why Zulip would offer that org setting in the first place; and its only suggestion is to identify a human admin and ask them, which is a pretty significant barrier.

In fact, if the org admins have made reasonable choices, then the reason they've disabled name changes within Zulip is because names in their Zulip org are synced from some other source (like a company LDAP or an organization's member directory), and the user can go to that source to change their name in Zulip and all the other systems that use it. But we haven't given the admins a good way to communicate that to their users.

Two things I think we can and should do, at least:

• Move the text out of the tooltip and into an explanatory <p> just under the grayed-out input field. This is a pretty natural question for the user to have if they've come to this page, and it's an important one if they have it, so I don't think we need to begrudge it the UI space.
• Add an organization setting for a few words of instructions on how to change one's name. I'm imagining something like
  • the help text becoming "Name changes have been disabled by your Zulip organization's admins. To update: {{ name_change_instructions }}", and
  • in the org settings, if "Prevent users from changing their name" is checked, offer a setting like "Instructions for users to change their name:", defaulting to something like "Contact an organization admin", and suggesting an alternative like "Update in company directory".

With the right UI on the org settings side, hopefully most admins who choose to use this setting would take a moment to explain the source they're supplying the names from instead.

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Edit by @alya 2024-05:

The explanation is now shown in a tooltip over the whole name field, which I think resolves the visibility part of this issue.

For the second part, we could allow admins to configure the second line of that tooltip under the "Prevent users from changing their name" option, when that option is checked. We'd want to show the current (default) text in that field initially, and allow it to be changed (with some reasonable character limit).

We'd need to think about how exactly to label it the option, which we can discuss in #design once someone is working on this. The new option will need to be documented on https://zulip.com/help/restrict-name-and-email-changes as part of making this change.

I imagine we'd want to create the same configuration option for email changes, and add a line to that tooltip as well.

[zulipbot]

Hello @zulip/server-settings members, this issue was labeled with the area: settings (admin/org), area: settings (user) labels, so you may want to check it out!

[shreyanshdwivedi]

@gnprice I would love to work on this issue. I understood where to make changes to achieve the first task.Can you please help me out in getting files to make changes to achieve the second task as stated by you?

[gnprice]

@shreyanshdwivedi Great! For the second step, our new feature tutorial should be a good example, because it goes through adding a new organization/realm setting, just like this one.

I'd also be glad to take a PR that does just the first step -- that should be useful already before we get to the second step.

[HydraulicSheep]

I would love to work on this @gnprice. I understand how to do both steps.

[HydraulicSheep]

@zulipbot claim

[utkarsh23]

@zulipbot claim

[HydraulicSheep]

Sorry about this. I forgot about this issue and then went offline for Christmas. Many apologies!

[gnprice]

Hi @utkarsh23 and @HydraulicSheep !

Looking back at this issue, I realize I described the status of it wrong when I first made it -- this isn't an issue that's ripe to do development on. What it really needs next is feedback from the admins of one or more orgs that would be interested in using the feature, so that we're sure we're building something people will actually use. I'll fix the labels to reflect that.

Apologies for taking you down the wrong path. Happily, there are many other issues that would be great for someone to take on! Look through the help wanted issues, especially those marked "good first issue" if it's your first couple of issues in Zulip.

[lzmartinico]

I know this is an old issue but as a note of interest this is something that our organisation would be interested in. All of our accounts authenticate through LDAP, and we have an internal tool that allows users to change some of their LDAP details (including name). Since people mostly care about their display name on Zulip, they tend to go there first to change their name and are confused on why they can't. It would be very useful to be able to redirect them to the internal tool from the settings menu. An alternative solution to this for us would be to allow name changes to sync into LDAP

[alya]

Thanks for the bump, @lzmartinico ! I updated the PR description, and marked this issue as "help wanted".