This is really a UX question, not design per se.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/104926/ (an under-review change) adds a warning if you choose a username that needs to be reformatted/canonicalized. For example, "my username" is changed to "My username".
It displays the warning, puts the new username ("My username") in the box, then you have to retype your password (twice), then press enter to confirm.
The main potential benefit, as I see it, is that if you don't like "My username" (the reformatted version), you can choose a different username entirely.
User experience feedback would be welcome; you can post on the change or here.
Matt Flaschen
What are all of the things that could need to be changed about a user name?
rather than getting to an error state could we just prohibit the user from creating incomptible input in the first place with something like this? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3199291/block-some-characters-from-being-...
Automatically capitalize the first character when entering text in the box, strip consecutive double spaces, and ignore when there is input of invalid characters?
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman
On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.orgwrote:
This is really a UX question, not design per se.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/104926/ (an under-review change) adds a warning if you choose a username that needs to be reformatted/canonicalized. For example, "my username" is changed to "My username".
It displays the warning, puts the new username ("My username") in the box, then you have to retype your password (twice), then press enter to confirm.
The main potential benefit, as I see it, is that if you don't like "My username" (the reformatted version), you can choose a different username entirely.
User experience feedback would be welcome; you can post on the change or here.
Matt Flaschen
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 8:32 PM, Jared Zimmerman < jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org> wrote:
What are all of the things that could need to be changed about a user name?
rather than getting to an error state could we just prohibit the user from creating incomptible input in the first place with something like this? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3199291/block-some-characters-from-being-...
Automatically capitalize the first character when entering text in the box, strip consecutive double spaces, and ignore when there is input of invalid characters?
It's a bit weird, because you don't actually have to change your username. The normal state right now is basically this...
- User enters 'abarfmonster' as username - MediaWiki checks if that is available and not too close to another username - 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.
The same happens with trailing whitespace, etc. What's being proposed is that we warn users and make them confirm their choice.
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…
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman
On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 11:16 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 8:32 PM, Jared Zimmerman < jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org> wrote:
What are all of the things that could need to be changed about a user name?
rather than getting to an error state could we just prohibit the user from creating incomptible input in the first place with something like this? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3199291/block-some-characters-from-being-...
Automatically capitalize the first character when entering text in the box, strip consecutive double spaces, and ignore when there is input of invalid characters?
It's a bit weird, because you don't actually have to change your username. The normal state right now is basically this...
- User enters 'abarfmonster' as username
- MediaWiki checks if that is available and not too close to another
username
- 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.
The same happens with trailing whitespace, etc. What's being proposed is that we warn users and make them confirm their choice.
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
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
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 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/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
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 03:30:25PM -0800, Jared Zimmerman wrote:
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.
This is a super painful usability issue - if someone types in characters, they expect those characters to show up in the input box. You can give them feedback about it, but simply *ignoring* the typing is not the way to do this.
See also: Password input boxes that silently ignore characters past 20 or 15 or whatever. It makes it impossible to use the site. This is less bad, but still not great.
Does it really matter if my name got slightly formatted? Seems like we are making a mountain out of a mole hill. If I log in with "my username" it should still allow me to login as "My username". Why do I care how things are formatted behind the scenes?
If a user enters an invalid character for users with JavaScript you could improve this by disabling the submit button and saying "invalid character entered". The combination of these 2 things seems more than enough over something trivial.
FWIW I find the fact we support case insensitive usernames extremely confusing and a bad user experience that we should try to rectify - both 'Jimbo_wales' and 'Jimbo_Wales' users exist leading to all sorts of confusing and unnecessary mistaken identity editing possibilities. I know of no other websites that do this and it makes sense not to...
On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 3:46 PM, Mark Holmquist mtraceur@member.fsf.org wrote:
On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 03:30:25PM -0800, Jared Zimmerman wrote:
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.
This is a super painful usability issue - if someone types in characters, they expect those characters to show up in the input box. You can give them feedback about it, but simply *ignoring* the typing is not the way to do this.
See also: Password input boxes that silently ignore characters past 20 or 15 or whatever. It makes it impossible to use the site. This is less bad, but still not great.
-- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation mtraceur@member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist
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Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On 01/07/2014 08:14 PM, Jon Robson wrote:
Does it really matter if my name got slightly formatted? Seems like we are making a mountain out of a mole hill. If I log in with "my username" it should still allow me to login as "My username". Why do I care how things are formatted behind the scenes?
As I indicated on the bug, I'm undecided whether this is worth it. However, to state the other side, it is not really behind the scenes. If I register as superm401, it will consistently show as Superm401, that's how people will refer to my username, and that's how it will show in the user tools bar, and everywhere else.
If a user enters an invalid character for users with JavaScript you could improve this by disabling the submit button and saying "invalid character entered". The combination of these 2 things seems more than enough over something trivial.
The only strictly invalid character (according to $wgInvalidUsernameCharacters) is '@'. However, other usernames (not individual characters) can be blocked by AntiSpoof as confusingly similar (e.g. if User:Abc is registered, User:Αbc can not) (Greek alpha)
FWIW I find the fact we support case insensitive usernames extremely confusing and a bad user experience that we should try to rectify - both 'Jimbo_wales' and 'Jimbo_Wales' users exist leading to all sorts of confusing and unnecessary mistaken identity editing possibilities. I know of no other websites that do this and it makes sense not to...
You mean case-sensitive (every letter is case-sensitive except the first). We should also check if AntiSpoof affects this at all. At any rate, any change would probably only affect new registrations.
Matt Flaschen
On Jan 7, 2014 9:14 PM, "Jon Robson" jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Does it really matter if my name got slightly formatted? Seems like we are making a mountain out of a mole hill. If I log in with "my username" it should still allow me to login as "My username". Why do I care how things are formatted behind the scenes?
People do complain about this on bugzilla on ocassion.
If a user enters an invalid character for users with JavaScript you could improve this by disabling the submit button and saying "invalid character entered". The combination of these 2 things seems more than enough over something trivial.
Some invalid chatacters (most actually) are invisible. Users may not realize nor be able to see the rlm they entered (for example).
There's also a distinction between normalization and invalid. Many wont know the difference between normalized chars (different spaces etc)
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Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
-- Jon Robson
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On Wed, 08 Jan 2014 02:14:16 +0100, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
FWIW I find the fact we support case insensitive usernames extremely confusing and a bad user experience that we should try to rectify - both 'Jimbo_wales' and 'Jimbo_Wales' users exist leading to all sorts of confusing and unnecessary mistaken identity editing possibilities. I know of no other websites that do this and it makes sense not to...
Registering such usernames is, as far as I know, currently blocked by the AntiSpoof extension. (Administrators can bypass these restrictions if they wish to.)
Max thanks for the demo, if it was exactly the same but instead of giving the user an error and making them backspace you replaced or reformatted the characters, but still showed the help message.
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman
On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.comwrote:
On Wed, 08 Jan 2014 02:14:16 +0100, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
FWIW I find the fact we support case insensitive usernames extremely
confusing and a bad user experience that we should try to rectify - both 'Jimbo_wales' and 'Jimbo_Wales' users exist leading to all sorts of confusing and unnecessary mistaken identity editing possibilities. I know of no other websites that do this and it makes sense not to...
Registering such usernames is, as far as I know, currently blocked by the AntiSpoof extension. (Administrators can bypass these restrictions if they wish to.)
-- Matma Rex
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
On 08.01.2014 00:30, Jared Zimmerman wrote:
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.
I understand your proposal, but I disagree with the concept of an input field that literally doesn't allow the user to type in an invalid username.
I don't think replacing seemingly random characters as the user types them would make for a very good user experience. The same goes for not showing invalid characters at all. An input field that for no apparent reason doesn't behave the way people are used to would in my opinion frustrate people, rather than helping them out.
Imho, we should instead show a little tooltip or something next to the input field that tells the user if certain characters are invalid. (This is a quite common pattern that most users should be familiar with). As you rightly pointed out though, an 'error' step should be avoided. Therefore, i suggest making the submit button unclickable until any invalid characters in the input field are replaced by the user.
I've made a little demo to make my concept a little clearer: http://cdpn.io/urwJf (Try entering an underscore in the 'username field')
On Wed, 08 Jan 2014 14:31:16 +0100, max max@koehler-kn.de wrote:
Imho, we should instead show a little tooltip or something next to the input field that tells the user if certain characters are invalid. (This is a quite common pattern that most users should be familiar with). As you rightly pointed out though, an 'error' step should be avoided. Therefore, i suggest making the submit button unclickable until any invalid characters in the input field are replaced by the user.
I've made a little demo to make my concept a little clearer: http://cdpn.io/urwJf (Try entering an underscore in the 'username field')
I largely agree, but two points are to be made:
1. Obviously, some solution is still necessary for people with JavaScript disabled, and the currently proposed one is probably as good as any other in that case; personally I would very much welcome some JavaScript-based client-side enhancements to our forms;
2. Actual validation of a MediaWiki username is easier said than done; apart from just reimplementing the core checking and normalisation logic (which by itself probably takes a few hundred lines of code; some related work was done as the mediawiki.Title module, luckily) we also need to check with the server about which names are already used, about anti-spoofing, etc.
If anybody wants to implement this, by all means go ahead and I will be happy to help and review, but please don't block good solutions because better ones are possible.
On 01/04/2014 09:52 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
This is really a UX question, not design per se.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/104926/ (an under-review change) adds a warning if you choose a username that needs to be reformatted/canonicalized. For example, "my username" is changed to "My username".
Umherirrender abandoned the change for now. However, they created a bug to track it, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61416
Matt Flaschen
Hey Matt,
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 7:25 AM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
It displays the warning, puts the new username ("My username") in the box, then you have to retype your password (twice), then press enter to confirm.
Would it be possible to validate the username while it is being typed and show some help text right there. Something along the lines of `User names are capitalized and can't have double spaces, your username "prateek saxena" should be changed to "Prateek Saxena"`, and not allow the user to submit the form until they've made this change.
Would that make sense?
-prtksxna
On 19/02/14 03:50, Prateek Saxena wrote:
Hey Matt,
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 7:25 AM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
It displays the warning, puts the new username ("My username") in the box, then you have to retype your password (twice), then press enter to confirm.
Would it be possible to validate the username while it is being typed and show some help text right there. Something along the lines of `User names are capitalized and can't have double spaces, your username "prateek saxena" should be changed to "Prateek Saxena"`, and not allow the user to submit the form until they've made this change.
Would that make sense?
-prtksxna
But if they just hit some sort of confirmation at the end, that would avoid forcing them change it themselves which might be a bit annoying if they don't actually care.
Dunno that it'd necessarily matter, though. Validation while typing would make sense here, though.
-L
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
But if they just hit some sort of confirmation at the end, that would avoid forcing them change it themselves which might be a bit annoying if they don't actually care.
I think users get a unhappy if changes happen to their profile without any notification. I remember how bad I felt when I got 'Prtksxna' instead of 'prtksxna' without any warning :P
-prtksxna
On 19/02/14 04:34, Prateek Saxena wrote:
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
But if they just hit some sort of confirmation at the end, that would avoid forcing them change it themselves which might be a bit annoying if they don't actually care.
I think users get a unhappy if changes happen to their profile without any notification. I remember how bad I felt when I got 'Prtksxna' instead of 'prtksxna' without any warning :P
Right, a warning is definitely good. Main question is just how best to go about that.
I can think of at least two other people who've been surprised/disappointed by similar (in one case for the uppercaseness, in another the _ disappearing).
-I
From: Isarra Yos
To: "A list for the design team." design@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:23:30 +0000 I can think of at least two other people who've been
surprised/disappointed by similar
(in one case for the uppercaseness, in
another the _ disappearing).
Seriously? User enters a username and the program silently registers him with another username than he entered?
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:27 PM, Gryllida gryllida@fastmail.fm wrote:
Seriously? User enters a username and the program silently registers him with another username than he entered?
Only capitalization of the first letter or trivial whitespace changes. The vast majority of users do not notice or care about such alterations.
From: Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org To: "A list for the design team." design@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:49:05 -0800
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:27 PM, Gryllida gryllida@fastmail.fm wrote:
Seriously? User enters a username and the program silently registers him with another username than he entered?
Only capitalization of the first letter or trivial whitespace changes. The vast majority of users do not notice or care about such alterations.
Software doing a different thing /silently/ is a problem.
On 19/02/14 08:26, Gryllida wrote:
From: Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org To: "A list for the design team." design@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:49:05 -0800
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:27 PM, Gryllida gryllida@fastmail.fm wrote:
Seriously? User enters a username and the program silently registers him with another username than he entered?
Only capitalization of the first letter or trivial whitespace changes. The vast majority of users do not notice or care about such alterations.
Software doing a different thing /silently/ is a problem.
That.
It's trivial stuff unless a user cares about it, but at which point it's the silently part that makes it really an issue. These are edge cases, but that doesn't make them not important too.
-I
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
That.
It's trivial stuff unless a user cares about it, but at which point it's the silently part that makes it really an issue. These are edge cases, but that doesn't make them not important too.
So figure out a solution that doesn't involve throwing an inactionable warning in the user's face and making them perform a confirmation step. The "solution" being proposed to the problem currently is worse than the current experience.
On 19/02/14 19:52, Steven Walling wrote:
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna@gmail.com mailto:zhorishna@gmail.com> wrote:
That. It's trivial stuff unless a user cares about it, but at which point it's the silently part that makes it really an issue. These are edge cases, but that doesn't make them not important too.So figure out a solution that doesn't involve throwing an inactionable warning in the user's face and making them perform a confirmation step. The "solution" being proposed to the problem currently is worse than the current experience.
On the contrary, that is exactly what needs to be done (in some fashion) in order to address the problem. If you personally do not believe it is a problem at all, that's fine, but you do not speak for those users or potential users who are affected.
-I
Steven Walling and all,
I think that a solution could be to implement a box where user enters a username, and a big fat username preview appears near it. If it's different, a (i) message (or several) inform user of the changes.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mediawiki_registration_box_Name_diff...
Gryllida
----- Original message ----- From: Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org To: "A list for the design team." design@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Design] UX question about username choice on signup Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 11:52:48 -0800
On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
That.
It's trivial stuff unless a user cares about it, but at which point it's the silently part that makes it really an issue. These are edge cases, but that doesn't make them not important too.
So figure out a solution that doesn't involve throwing an inactionable warning in the user's face and making them perform a confirmation step. The "solution" being proposed to the problem currently is worse than the current experience.
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:23 PM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
Right, a warning is definitely good. Main question is just how best to go about that.
I can think of at least two other people who've been surprised/disappointed by similar (in one case for the uppercaseness, in another the _ disappearing).
Just apply the necessary string changes (capitalization, underscores, etc.) on blur and show a small informational message. Don't make the user think - tell them what's going on, and if it's a problem for them, they will correct their behavior accordingly.
What problem are we trying to solve here? From reading the discussion the warning is unintrusive and doesn't impose any additional clicks when registering — thanks! — but it would be interesting to know whether any registered contributors experienced surprise about their username being lowercase contrary to what they expected.
On Wed, 19 Feb 2014 02:55:37 +0100, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 01/04/2014 09:52 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
This is really a UX question, not design per se.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/104926/ (an under-review change) adds a warning if you choose a username that needs to be reformatted/canonicalized. For example, "my username" is changed to "My username".
Umherirrender abandoned the change for now. However, they created a bug to track it, https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61416
I extended the change with additional client-side checks and resubmitted: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/114400 . It behaves basically the same, but we check everything with an AJAX request if the user has JavaScript enabled, no form resubmitting needed. It was also easy to add checks for invalid or taken usernames, so I did that as well. Reviews welcome :)