On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 8:32 PM, Jared Zimmerman < jared.zimmerman(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design

Jared Zimmerman wrote: 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: 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! Yep, this is a really good change to implement. Thanks for working on this. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design

On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 03:30:25PM -0800, Jared Zimmerman wrote: 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(a)member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design

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.

-- Jon Robson * http://jonrobson.me.uk * https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson * @rakugojon _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design

On Wed, 08 Jan 2014 02:14:16 +0100, Jon Robson &lt;jdlrobson(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: FWIW I find the fact we support case insensitive usernames extremely 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design

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')

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.

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.

To: "A list for the design team." &lt;design(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:23:30 +0000 I can think of at least two other people who've been

(in one case for the uppercaseness, in

From: Steven Walling &lt;swalling(a)wikimedia.org&gt; To: "A list for the design team." &lt;design(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 21:49:05 -0800 On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:27 PM, Gryllida &lt;gryllida(a)fastmail.fm&gt; wrote: Only capitalization of the first letter or trivial whitespace changes. The vast majority of users do not notice or care about such alterations.

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.

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.