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Comment by Dannymetconan | Hacker News Reader

I can very much relate to this but also have very little sympathy here.

I have a special character in my name, an apostrophe, and it causes trouble regularly online and with tooling. A number of years ago I decided just to never use it when it came to anything to do with technical work be it email, logins or usernames.

Unicode characters are a pain to deal with and I have suffered from it first hand trying to handle it. At the end of the day it is much easier just to not use the special characters and move on with your life rather then be battling the constant frustration.

I'm sure these tools have lots of issues opening and you would be surprised at the amount of time, effort and testing it would be required to provide fully Unicode support. Most people would see it as a very small positive and not worth the effort. I find it hard to disagree.

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My legal last name is "Sirén". When I was younger, I almost always used "Siren", because it was easier to type. Then, ~15 years ago, I started noticing that American websites sometimes rejected it, because they considered it inappropriate. Sometimes "Sirén" would work, sometimes it worked but caused minor annoyances, and sometimes it would not work for technical reasons.

Both versions work most of the time these days, but I still run into trouble once in a while no matter which name I use.

Why would Siren be an inappropriate name?

Someone who I know has the last name ‘Island’ and was unable to sign up for Facebook forever because they thought it was a fake last name.

Maybe ‘Siren’ is similar. It’s a pre-existing word that perhaps flags some sort of weird edge case.

My best guess is the Sirens of greek myth, who are often (incorrectly) depicted as sexual temptresses. Bit of a stretch, though.

Totally agree with the sentiment. It has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years. Very frustrating to have your name blacklisted by that. It does seem most system have a very US focused design.

I still find it funny that even in my home country you can't use a lot of local special characters in names. Also most airlines won't accept it so technically I'm not giving them my true name!

I can relate, mine is O'Rourke and even in 2021 I get:

- websites telling me I have an invalid name

- post addressed to O'Rourke, O\\\Rourke, O&Rourke

- "my account" pages say "Welcome, Mr O\Rourke"

The best one I have every seen is O\apostropheRourke for a car rental in France. I have no idea how they thought that was a good idea!

I'm really surprised someone technically minded thought it's a good idea to put a non ASCII character in their username. I'd never do that.

I'm really surprised someone technically minded thought it's a good idea to not allow non ASCII alphanumerics in a username.

Unicode has been a thing since 1988. Names have included non a-z characters since forever.

Well in this case they were explicitly allowed it just caused problems down the line when other system attempted to consume them.

String come up again and again as a hard issue to deal with especially once your start looking at Unicode. I think it would be very reasonable to assume only ASCII works and even then it doesn't always work!

Unicode really wasn't practical at all back then. Unless your entire system end-to-end was built internally, you'd have to interact with some non-unicode software. There was also no agreement on a common UTF-8 encoding, and other unicode encodings were all broken anyway.

Names have been spoken and hand-written since forever yet somehow computers aren't good at that so we all tolerate converting them to printed-looking text. Nobody cares, it doesn't matter.

ASCII only is not appropriate in some locales, as the keyboards don't have a-z. This is why in Thailand people tend to use their mobile phone number as their password, because it can be typed on all the common keyboard layouts they will encounter.

Also, with Windows 10 users will often not even choose their username. It gets generated from their given name + surname (which is a whole different issue for people without one or t'other).

There's nothing special about a username vs any other string. If there is, that is a problem.

Since identifiers like usernames are seen by people they are susceptible to homograph attack and _do_ deserve to be treated a bit more carefully. Also you probably dont want usernames like ń̸̡͍̲̲̫̰̦̔͛̋̉͊̔̈̈̈́̀͑͘i̶̜̔̐̅̔̑̈̕͝͝g̶̢̭̮̲͕͉͔͙̳̥͖̉̏̇̎̊̈́̊̆̃̎̑͆̿͠ͅh̶̡̛̪͔̯̯͈̼̿͊̂̍͐͒͐͐̆̽͛̄̽͝t̸̛͔̮̆͊̋́̑̓̅̀̆͋̕ͅf̸̤̗̺̣̤̝̟̱͎̦̀͒̽̓̋̏͌͋̇͛ͅḷ̶̭̓̿́y̵͍̦̫̫̠͆͛͋̓͑͑͋̔͑́̔̽̚̚

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