My personal preference would be to deal with it explicitly rather than leaving it to a quirk of jQuery/HTML interaction.

In those places where we're returning a username for a row, we should have a function that fetches the username and explicitly returns it as a string.  Being deliberate would prevent others in the future from making revisions without thinking about the consequences, and also always provide the correct value.

A [little test](http://jsfiddle.net/ringmaster/JSbES/) shows that we don't need to worry about .data() truncating number-prefixed usernames to just the number.  If there's text there, it returns the text too.

I'll add some changes for this into my pending update.