I think their might be some misunderstanding as to what I'm proposing, my suggestion is that is is literally impossible to type a user name that is incompatible with our system, there would be no before and after, there would be no submit and then show a different user name, as the user types in the input field only acceptable characters and formats are accepted, characters that aren't allowed either don't show up and all or are automatically replaced as the user types, if they type i as the first character I is shown instead. there is not "error" step in the process. 



Jared Zimmerman  \\  Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation               
M : +1 415 609 4043 |   :  @JaredZimmerman



On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 3:33 PM, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Jared Zimmerman wrote:
> the lowercase names resolve correctly anyway, so as far as the user is
>concerned there really is no difference. are only trailing spaces
>striped. eg. can I have "a barf monster" or "a  barf  monster" it doesn't
>seems like there would be a valid reason to have "abarfmonster   " as a
>username…

Sorry, but I think this is attitude is pretty wrong.

To say "as far as the user is concerned there really is no difference" is
completely wrong. If you want to register as "iPod song" and your username
gets silently changed to "IPod song", it's easy to see how this is a user
experience failure. This shows up on literally every single page while
you're logged in. It shows up in your user signature. It shows up in user
page histories, watchlists, Special:RecentChanges, Special:Preferences,
and on your user and user talk pages.

Some people prefer all lowercase usernames. If they know that isn't
possible, they'll sometimes change the overall name to not look stupid.
For example, if you want to be known as "jared.zimmerman" but you know
it'll be output as "Jared.zimmerman", you might choose "Jared.Zimmerman"
or "Jared Zimmerman" instead.

Not to get too technical, but while page titles use underscores internally
(e.g., "Barack_Obama"), usernames use spaces internally (e.g., "Steven
(WMF)"). Multiple consecutive spaces are merged into one space and
trailing and preceding spaces are stripped. Underscores are silently
converted to spaces. So if you want to register the username
"__pretty_in_pink__", which plenty of other user auth systems would be
fine with, MediaWiki will currently silently turn this into "Pretty in
pink". Yowza.

Steven Walling wrote:
> - If it's available, account is successfully created, but silently in
>the background, it's changed to 'Abarfmonster' because usernames are page
>titles technically speaking and thus must start with a capital.

Not quite. :-)  As just noted, usernames use spaces while page titles use
underscores. Some wikis, such as Wiktionaries, remove the
first-letter-must-be-capitalized restriction, but the reason it continues
to apply to usernames is that it would have made unified login a real
nightmare.

There are legacy usernames that contain underscores, at signs, and other
previously allowed characters. Just recently we had a case come up where
the username had been using a lowercase "mu" or similar and an update to
PHP's collations caused all kinds of funkiness as MediaWiki started to
auto-capitalize the first letter. Fun times!

> The same happens with trailing whitespace, etc. What's being proposed is
>that we warn users and make them confirm their choice.

Yep, this is a really good change to implement. Thanks for working on this.

MZMcBride



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