On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 00:18, Sophie <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/24/09, Mark Smith <[email protected]> wrote: >> > (Hm... will usernames that start with "xn__" be allowed? Then people >> > could register, say, xn__lite_9oa as their username, resulting in a >> > subdomain of élite.dreamwidth.org.) >> >> Hmmm, yeah, those should be disallowed. > > Should they? I can see some great applications of those. I think the > point being made was that such names would be quite useful.
Unfortunately, a popular use for such names is registering, for example, rаhаеlі.dreamwidth.org (spot the Cyrillic letters a e i), and similar look-alike letters. On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 02:35, Mark Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm against them from an impersonation aspect, confusing users, etc. > If we can find a good/useful way of supporting them (i.e., allowing > people to register usernames with accented characters, and then we > allow this sort of subdomain) then sure, but otherwise, let's not. It might be worth looking at what ccTLD registries do; they have to contend with things like that. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name#Top-Level_Domains_known_to_accept_IDN_registration> ( http://xrl.us/bedqnu ) Perhaps one way would be to require names to contain only one script (only Latin, or only Arabic, or only Hebrew, etc.). Though maybe even only-Grek and especially only-Cyrillic would clash with Latin given that several letterforms are similar. What's probably least problematic is allowing only Latin, including accented Latin, but no other scripts. Cheers, -- Philip Newton <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
