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Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 5:22 am
by JAB Creations
First before
anything else I'm
not endorsing
leet user names. This is more of a discussion about characters you prefer to use for your username and in English.
I'm mostly referring to spaces, underscores, and dashes. As I'm working on refining my registration script I'm thinking about issues such as having two or three users such as "bob_frank", "bob-frank", and "bob frank".
I'm thinking about just supporting alpha-numeric characters and spaces at this point though I'd like to hear other people's input please.

Re: Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 5:34 am
by onion2k
I would argue in favour of @, _, - and . in case anyone wants to use their email address as their username.
Re: Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 5:46 am
by panic!
I think alpha numeric and spaces is fair enough!
Re: Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 5:57 am
by JAB Creations
onion, I have considered and will support signing in via using email addresses, though I'll have to devise an efficient way to determine username versus email address at a later point in time. So yes I agree though as far as user names go I won't support those characters though I could entertain the periods possibly. In example if I add name_first and name_last columns to my DB using a period between your first and last name may be a third option for authenticating.
Re: Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 6:20 am
by Jenk
I usually restrict to ASCII chars that can be typed on typical keyboards (without the use of alt+numpad) so pretty much a-z including circumflex/etc, numeric and @ # etc.
Re: Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 5:11 pm
by Mordred
I can't see any point against allowing all possible characters.
Re: Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Tue Sep 09, 2008 5:22 pm
by JAB Creations
JAB Creations wrote:"bob_frank", "bob-frank", and "bob frank"
Re: Username Debate - which forbidden chars. are must haves?
Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2008 3:51 am
by Mordred
Umm, double negative?
I can't see any point against allowing all possible characters.
To be clear(er): Allow all possible characters.