iamthewalrus(:3= gets ported over as iamthewalrus_3
A lot of message boards have restrictions like this. It usually has something to do with how they store the user names and accounts. Unfortunately it’s not something that we have any control over.
I recall we had one poster (who I haven’t seen for a while) whose name consisted entirely of exotic characters. I’m wondering if they get converted to ___________ or to
As an IT professional, I fully agree with you. The rational is that a dictionary attack is an order of magnitude (or more) more challenging. The reality is that many people just add “!” at the end of their password and call it a day.
I use a password manager with either a completely random password for sites I rarely log in to and a mnemonic password for my daily use accounts. This is usually built from a movie line or a song lyric to make it easy to type, easy to remember, but not vulnerable to a dictionary attack. For example, if I was a fan of Star Wars, I could use empire&LC80 (Empire Strikes Back, Lando Calrissian, 1980).
Could it be that this is just a quirk of the port but isn’t an actual limitation? Maybe a new user could have spaces and old ones could be changed back.
Yeah, I know: a lot of message boards aren’t as powerful and state-of-the-art as the vBulletin we have now.
No. Discourse doesn’t allow it.
I don’t know the actual technical reason in this case, but typically things like this result from the system creating a file name with the user’s name to store all of their user data, which restricts the user name to valid file name characters. vBulletin, for all of its other faults, seems to store user data by user number and the name is just a text string, which makes it more flexible.
The Discourse user data is in a Postgres database table called ‘users’
That would be interesting. It read out as DeepFried as I recall but with crazy characters. You could probably find it since you have access to the Members List. It would be one of the first alphanumerically.
Found it!
«Ðëëp¤F®ïêd»™.
The things I will waste my time doing during quarantine…
I asked in a PM, and my name transfers as Face_Intentionally_Left_Blank, which is considerably more than 20 characters. Still wondering if I shouldn’t change it a bit, as it’s unwieldy. Gotta think a bit.
Does the new system allow an ASCII 255 (Alt-255) character in a username? That character displays as a space.
How about ____Intentionally_Left Blank.
Oh yeah, that should about do it. 
ISTM we also had a user named ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think there is a lot of confusion here. If I understand correctly, for instance, Face Intentionally Left Blank ** will transfer as Face_Intentionally_Left_Blank but FaceIntentionallyLeftBlank** will transfer as FaceIntentionallyLeftBlank. So if you don’t want underscores in your name you need to remove spaces either before or after the transfer. So there is no hurry to rush into changing user names.
It does kind of suck, and it’s kind of astonishing that new (more modern?) bulletin board software can’t handle arbitrary strings for usernames, but whatever.
If I may request, can my username just become iamthewalrus? Without the emoticon it doesn’t really make sense to have the other characters.
Spaces appear to be filtered out by this file, though it’s not clear exactly what for.
This gets ported over as _Deep_F_ied
This gets ported over as Anonymous_f66420f42f1d36f3335aec9be0ff2cd3
That’s the worst mangling I’ve seen yet. Holy cow.
One thing I have noticed is that if you view a profile here on vBulletin the URL contains the system’s user number.
My profile, for example, is user number 13769:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/member.php?u=13769
On Discourse, the name is part of the URL:
https://boards.straightdope.com/admin/users/13677/engineer_comp_geek
Doing it this way requires all parts of the user name to conform to what is allowed in a URL, which is significantly limiting. It also means that we’re probably not going to be able to change it, unfortunately.
I’m not happy about it, but it looks like we are stuck with it. We’ll just have to deal with it as best as we can and go forward.
I imagine my username doesn’t come across well, does it?
That’s what you get for being employed by Big Spark.