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Comment by _glass | Hacker News Reader

My last name contains the character ß. This silently fails often, that's why I put in ss almost everywhere, because a lot of important mail had then encoding errors. Also difficult is the transition between different countries, that don't have this letter. In Germany for official communication it has to be ß, but in the other country it has to be ss. That's why we need proper unicode support everywhere.

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This is I think a much bigger issue, and pretty much impossible to understand for most users: the fact that the frontend happily accepted your name/e-mail/whatever is _not_ an proof that it can handle it. I tried to use gmail's feature that you own all addresses of the form my.name+whatever@gmail.com when registering to services, but it silently failed so often that I do not even bother trying anymore.

A mere email... I had a situation with a bank when their website accepted new password but the backend implicitly and without feedback trimmed the new password to 10 characters.

HSBC had this problem. Not sure if it still does, but it's a big enough institution that I feel it deserves being called out.

Permanent TSB in Ireland did the same until like 2020.

I had this problem with Transunion (a credit reporting agency in the US). They shortened my password to 15 characters, didn't tell me or anything, I had to figure it out myself when trying to login.

Paypal did this with 20 characters. I can't even remember how I figured it out so I could login.

I don't know if it truncated it automatically or it just stopped accepting input after 20 characters and I of course did not notice since the password entry fields were masked.

Their password reset form didn’t have the restriction, so you could reset your password to 21 chars, and then never log in again

Same, on multiple sites. It is obnoxious as heck

> That's why we need proper unicode support everywhere.

A couple of years ago when I wrote a little webapp to do some scheduling stuff for our community's yearly conference, I just used plain unicode strings for usernames, including spaces. I didn't really see why not: The database (SQLite) handles unicode, the backend (golang) handles unicode, the frontend handles unicode, nothing ever gets passed into a shell program or put into CSV or anything, all queries are parameterized; why bother making pointless restrictions?

At least ss is an acceptable and widley understood replacement for ß.

My last name end on "ić" so every time, even on many EU shops and websites, I get to choose if I want to write my name wrong with "ic" and definitley get the package(cause the post understands) or write my name properly and get my package in 90% of cases.

Its just plain weird that a Spanish/French/UK online shop will support their weird characters but not full Unicode.

> I get to choose if I want to write my name wrong ... and definitley get the package ... or write my name properly and get my package in 90% of cases.

every time i walk into a coffee shop i have to judge how much trouble spelling my name 'correctly' will be and will switch to "Y" in those cases

like, I thought Joachim was supposed to blaze the trail for the rest of us soft J's :(

> Its just plain weird that a Spanish/French/UK online shop will support their weird characters but not full Unicode.

Between plain 7-bit ASCII and full Unicode there were a few decades of make-do with several 8 bit encodings.

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