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