[ic] Automatically generating usernames and passwords

[interchange-users@icdevgroup.org (John Allman)]

Hi - i realise this is a bit of an odd one but i want to be able to have 
a page similar to the usual new_account page but which will optionally 
generate a new unique username and password if none are supplied. At the 
moment i'm considering using a counter as the basis for the username and 
locking it and incrementing it each time a new username is created (i'm 
intending to do this by using mysqls locking abilities. is there a 
better way to do it?)

Unfortunately my approach to having it optionally use a different 
username if none is supplied doesn't seem to work. My plan was to set 
username in mv_click if it was not already set, but it doesn't seem to 
be working. I stripped down my code to just set username regardless but 
still nothing.

Can someone point out what's wrong with this?
[set EmailCheck]
        [value name=username set="fartknocker"]
        [perl]
                $CGI->{username}="fartknocker";
        [/perl]
[/set]

other than ugliness, like. i have mv_click set to EmailCheck in the form.

I'm guessing my whole approach is wrong. Can anybody give me advice?

thanks

John