Hello, fellow Discoursers, I hope you’re enjoying a great day/night!
I was surprised to see a username here that doesn’t use any alphanumeric character (Илья_Комаров). I don’t recall seeing one before
I don’t know if non-alphanumeric characters are allowed here for a long time. But I find it a bit strange to allow them on this forum which is an English-spoken platform.
It’s slightly detrimental to communication since I can’t mention[1] or write (or even pronounce) this user’s username without having to rely on copy-pasting.
Usernames should always be easy to @mention.
I think full names are the right place to make use of non-alphanumeric characters
The full name doesn’t have any non-alphanumeric character as well ↩︎
There are some. Not a lot, but I’ve seen a few sign-ups each month that use Unicode characters since we introduced Unicode usernames and group names in 2019.
It was enabled for testing and dogfooding, and I guess we can’t disable it anymore unless we rename all users who have Unicode characters in their username. Otherwise, those users would be broken.
From a technical standpoint, they are… you just aren’t used to typing those letters.
I can read and pronounce that name, but I have no skills to write it on iPad.
As a user it doesn’t matter (for me), because I don’t mention anyone. But as an admin I don’t know how I would search a user with cyrillic or any others characters.
I was working in a cybercafé a long time ago. One day, a client, clearly puzzled after struggling with his computer, came to me and asked, “Where’s the ‘n’ key on your keyboards? There’s no key ‘n’?” I pointed to the “n” key on his keyboard and said, “The ‘n’ is here.” He thanked me and returned to his writing.
