Allow user_id lookups from username

[sleepylessons]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Many actions cannot be performed if you do not know the user ID of a user.

For example, the /public/v1/moderation/bans API requires a user_id param to be passed.

However, there is no way to look up a user's ID from their username. This means that API consumers must keep lists of user_ids relevant to whatever they are building, to be able to reliably perform actions that require them.

Use case example: Say I build a moderation panel app. It has a input with a submit button that allows me to ban users by username. Say I know a username of someone I want to ban, but I have no clue what their user ID is. There is no way to programmatically get that information, and therefore my implementation is impossible to accomplish.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to see /public/v1/users be updated to accept user_id OR username, and thusly return both of those params as part of the response.

The current 200 response is:

{
  "data": [
    {
      "email": "john.doe@example.com",
      "name": "John Doe",
      "profile_picture": "https://kick.com/img/default-profile-pictures/default-avatar-2.webp",
      "user_id": 123
    }
  ],
  "message": "text"
}

username doesn't even exist in this response. It would be nice if it did.

Or, alternatively, every API endpoint that accepts user_id as a parameter should also be able to accept a username as a parameter in lieu of user_id

Describe alternatives you've considered
As my personal app tracks chat messages externally, I have considered (and have implemented) a list of all users that have sent chat messages in this session, so I can derive their user_ids. But this causes two problems:

• I'm wasting memory storing a cached list of users
• I can't ban people that haven't shown up in my chat this session

This is undesirable because I may want to ban/unban someone on the fly from my app that