Lessen new character naming restrictions (character creation and name changing)

[Snowdonia Honeythorn]

It use to be a person could have an apostrophy, space, or hyphen in their name. It seems since the induction of the name changing system these characters have been removed from the table of accepted characters in a name.

I'd like to suggest that these characters be again made available in the Surname field as they once were. One of each of these characters available for the surname. So people with surnames like von Velt, Sutter-Hamillton, or La'Jeanoux can have their appropiate puctuation or space seperation.

[C`gan]

The apostrophe is simple enough to get around. Use the ` found to the left of 1 on most keyboards instead of the ' found right of the ; on the keyboard.

That's how I got my name to display correctly.

[Snowdonia Honeythorn]

I tried it C`gan. Still didn't work. These are new naming parameters put in since the introduction of the name change facilitation on the site (I believe, may have been changed later). I tried both the apostrophy and the ` and I still got the same message. If it isn't straight alpha, it isn't allowed now.

Yet someone can still have THEIR NAME in full caps or ThEiR nAmE in alternating caps. Go figure. lol

[Bori Grimbattle]

Although all Caps or alternating caps is a pain the use of punctuation in the name leaves it too open to abuse. Take any word and subs'tit'ute appostrophes and you will see what I am getting at. Perhaps if they had more time to check names and change those that are offensive or clearly designed to circumvent policies then they could relax said policy.

At present I do not think it advisable.

[Fratricide]

It used to be that the players reported those offenders to either to the support site... or to in game CSR's.. but I know that those are less seen now. Just let the players report the offenses and then have the player be quarentined until they change their name to one more appropriate.

[C`gan]

Getting back to the base problem, I know how to handle it in Turbo Pascal. Essentially, the names are string variables, but the exact type of string variable is limiting to alphanumeric rather than the full ASCII range (256 characters). The downside to allowing the other characters in also allows for other abuses of leetspeak. So, it would require a boolean function to search through the name strings to exclude the codes that aren't wanted to allow for the ones that are and change that name string variables into more of a packed array of characters. Once the function processed the packed array of characters (and iterating for incorrect ones until the name is "clean"), then a routine would have to take the packed array and append each character to the previous in an actual string variable.

[Pharcellus]

Show me the code! [:P]

Seriously, beyond leetspeak abuses, there is a potential problem with corrupting database queries, because apostrophes and quotes are used in SQL queries as string delimiters and, if not properly escaped, can lead to nastiness up to and including SQL injection attacks.

Usually, it is just easier to say "no" to anything other than good, old-fashined alphanumerics.

[Guaran]

Try using foreign country ( and other ) ascii character sets.

Things like ? ? ü â ï Ã** ?

Maybe you can find something you like in place of `

::edit::
On second thought, it would be hard to type you a manual group invite, better skip it.

[Snowdonia Honeythorn]

I'm not talking about first named Guar, only surnames. I've never really felt these characters were appropiate for first names (no offense C`gan :P) but for surnames they make sense.

[C`gan]

Mine is an honorific contraction of name. But I will agree with you, certain characters do not belong at all in names, be they surnames or otherwise.

! @ # $ %^ & * ( ) < > ? / | \, for instance.

[Gliding Frost]

Mine is an honorific contraction of name. But I will agree with you, certain characters do not belong at all in names, be they surnames or otherwise.

! @ # $ %^ & * ( ) < > ? / | \, for instance.

Isn't C'gan one of the names from Anne McCafferey's series? I know it definetly fits with her naming style.

[LaughingOtter]

Yep. We have a guildie named FLar - same naming convention.

I think it's kind of funny that two dragons are using honorifics that are used by dragon *riders*, instead of the -th suffix ued by Pernese *dragons*.

[C`gan]

I'm not a dragon. A dragon can't have all 5 construction classes.