[Foundation-l] Automatic username transliteration for SUL

Thu Dec 21 17:12:32 UTC 2006

Nicholas Moreau wrote:
> What about setting things up so that to create a SUL username with say,
> Tegulu characters, you *must* register at TE, no other language's
> registration form will accept it. That will significantly cut down on vanity
> and vandal usage of the such characters.
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:50:33 -0500
> From: Stephanie Erin Daugherty <stephanie at sosdg.org>
>
> This is especially true when abusive users have deliberately taken advantage
> of this fact in order to make the lives of administrators and of other
> Wikipedians as difficult as possible, and it's also true for those handful
> of users that will mix character sets to "look cool" at the inconvenience of
> others.
>
>   
Stephanie,

Character set mixing within usernames is no longer allowed, at least on 
en: -- that is to say, each username must contain characters from only a 
single writing system, in order to prevent cross-script homograph 
attacks, and cannot contain any characters that are not associated with 
a human natural writing system (such as math characters, symbols, line 
art characters, and so on...)

When SUL is rolled out, this restriction will need to be applied to all 
wikis.

I like Nick's idea of only being able to register name at a wiki that 
has the script of that name in common use: this would mean that 
registering abusive nicknames in wikis that do not understand a 
particular script will easily be caught, and aid the socialization of 
new users into the appropriate communities.

-- Neil