Ability to set username field in database to be equal to email address

instead of taking the fragment of the user's email address and making that the username, why not just make the email address itself the username?

While I recognize that a raw email address may not be pretty, it is guaranteed to be unique for every user.

You can then override how the username is displayed by creating a function called phptemplate_username() to intercept theme_username() if you want to change how it gets rendered on-screen.

I've created a patch that allows for this feature to be enabled via an administration page (in case you prefer to use the "default" username generation method).