So imagine if you had a channel with John, Jack, Jill, Joe, and Jason. In the current Android app and on the OLED, all messages arrive from “J”. Is there a plan to use the full name string in the future?
Behind the scenes there are actually two names (and a unique identifier the user never sees). The Long Name is what you enter in the box. The “Short Name” is up to three characters. There is currently no UI for setting the short name, it just picks the first letter of up to two names in the text box. So “Bob Someone” becomes “BS” ;-).
The OLED is small so I think we’ll always want to use the shortname there, but we should document what I just wrote somewhere ;-). Or let users have more control of what the shortname is.
But if everyone just enters one name, Bill and Bob will both be shown as “B.” But yes, if it’s documented as “hey, if you can’t tell who’s who, tell your friends to enter their last names.” Hopefully the friends aren’t John Unger and Jill Unger, or Bill Smith and Bob Short, or we’re back to the same issue. 
Being able to set one’s own 3-letter short name would go a long way, though. “First Middle Last” initials, for instance.
Orrrr just show the longname in the app UI. 
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I know this is “little stuff,” you have bigger issues to work through. But I just got here, and the low hanging fruit is just so tasty.
This would be great for larger groups especially. At that point it almost becomes a “call sign” like in aviation.
Bonus: How hard would it be to detect an initial collision? Aka two or more people using the same first letters of their name. Then it might be worth falling back to a combination of part of their unique identifier and initial.
I would prefer to be able to manually modify the short name. The APP could show the compressed short name by default, but also allow the user to modify it by selecting the box and writing to it?
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Yeah. I think the best fix is to make short name editable (and the default value is the initials from the longname)
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