[Cosmo-dev] Allowable Characters in Cosmo Usernames

[Todd Agulnick]

On 5/18/2006 7:49 AM, Brian Moseley wrote:
> in the spirit of being as permissive as possible, however, it might be
> okay for us to explicitly allow all of these characters, including
> '/', and field any support questions that might come up from
> mycrazyusername at here&there.

Easy for you to say! You're not going to have field those support 
questions. ;-) As someone who *does* field 'em, I'm very much in favor 
disallowing characters that are going to cause problems for unwitting 
users. Allowing anyone to have "&" in their username isn't worth even a 
single user writing to say that they can't access their account. I have 
my own front-end for account creation, so I can be more restrictive than 
Cosmo, but I'd prefer that Cosmo lock down these characters anyway 
because users can always go around my front end.

On the more generic question of non-ASCII characters in usernames, are 
there good examples of online services that allow them? My quick scan 
didn't turn up any and I wonder whether that's due to a preponderance of 
US-centric, international-unaware development -- or whether there's some 
other problem lurking here. I, for one, am nervous (again) about 
supporting users whose usernames I can't read (or can't render because I 
don't have the fonts). And my preliminary tests with my client failed 
when I tried using non-ASCII characters (probably because the encoding 
happened at the wrong level, or maybe because encoding happened into 
UTF-16 instead of UTF-8), so there is some non-trivial complexity here.

Either way, definitive answers to these questions would be really 
useful. Has anyone had experience with a service that allowed non-ASCII 
usernames?  Are there other issues that we haven't foreseen?

-Todd
 


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