@usernames

Let me get this right, do you mean to display e.g. “Bill Gates” instead of “@bill” when viewing a post in Frontend?

Ok.
Have a look here https://www.authorsure.com/827/wordpress-username-security
Let me know if you see the issue I am raising.
And the fact that Automattic is not caring about revealing username is not a smart at all as far as I am concerned.

OK, I unterstand the problem you see with publishing usernames. Thanks for drawing attention to this! I’ll add this option in a future version.

Thanks a lot.
Truth is this I found out Autoamttic using the @username in its p2 theme internally as a production platform does not care to display usernames. Well mayby there are 30 with each core developer his own double verification key from the tablet to login so they actually do not care. But when using p2 or hashtagger with 100’s of facebook type users then it becomes important.
So up to you but I believe it is necessary when using wordpress like a forum or social platform like buddypress.
Thanks for your understanding.

Thanks for drawing my attention to that. This inspired me to another plugin. Take a look at: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/smart-user-slug-hider

Thanks a lot and I love the yellow hat ??
I think that you should change the 404 error page feature ( The WordPress default URLs (like https://www.example.com/author/admin) will cause a 404 (not found) error.) or do you mean that the url you created with your plugin https://www.example.com/author/e9e716def73f76ac does NOT create a 404 error ?
Because auhor url are crawled and indexed by google all the time and basically by default. So if there is a 404 for all author pages that is too negative.
Now the random keys display name is smart but only where there is a site with lots of authors (special case kind of). So the authors are not necessarily bothering security then in this case your plugin is good.
I tried to answer you with some input based on my experience.
Thanks for your great contribution.

added an option to use @nicknames instead of @usernames in V 2.1

Thank you very much.
This is super cool
And your plugin is damn awesome i like it more than the native tag system of wp !!!