API for changing display name in a specific room (SPEC-230)

[matrixbot]

Submitted by @​matthew:matrix.org
Not high priority, but we theoretically support per-room display names and profile data - could be useful for manual disambiguating and other fun. Alien and others occasionally ask for it

(Imported from https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SPEC-230)

[matrixbot]

Links exported from Jira:

vector-web matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#2458

[jcgruenhage]

Possibly not that rare use case:
Someone uses Matrix to communicate with people they know in real life. They'd probably want their normal name shown then. This same person also is in some Matrix channels about a game they play, for that they'd want to use their in-game name, so that others can recognize them.

[leonerd]

There already is an API for doing this. You simply update your own m.room.member state event in the room. I've been successfully using this in some bridges/gateways, to allow them to set per-room displaynames.

[leonerd]

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-tg/blob/master/lib/Portal.js#L145-L153

[richvdh]

sounds like this is just a documentation job then

[richvdh]

(though we might need server-side support to ensure you can still change your "default" displayname without breaking per-room displaynames?)

[akien-mga]

So this seems to be implemented in the API already, but it's not exposed to end users in clients such as Riot, is it?

[jooert]

If someone is interested in updating their displayname in certain rooms manually, I wrote a small Python script to do this.