That's a matter of technical impracticality -- when LJ switched to using _foobar_.livejournal.com instead of livejournal.com/users/_foobar_, it conflicted with an internet-specification saying that subdomains can't start or end with hyphens or underscores.
Adding it to the reserved list was, IIRC, the easiest way of blocking new usernames that fit that format, especially since usernames like that could still be used on clone sites that didn't standardize the username.livejournal.com URL format, so it wasn't quite the same as the "can only use numbers, letters, hyphen/underscore" rule. -isabeau chasy wrote: > LJ won't let you start a username with an underscore anymore (says > it's reserved) BUT I had two friends whose names started with one > (actually, two). What's that all about? Will DW reserve those too? Is > it a coding conflict or something? > - Chasy. > > On 1/31/09, Philip Newton <[email protected]> wrote: >> 2009/1/31 Mark Smith <[email protected]>: >>> Denise and I will go through it and probably pare the list down some, >>> but we'll be using it as the base to build the list from. I'd also >>> rather err on the side of reserving too many names than too few, as >>> you can't kick somebody off of a name later. >> Wasn't there somebody on LiveJournal who was not allowed to upgrade to >> a paid account, ever, because his username was in use as an email >> alias, and that would have conflicted with his paid account email? >> (IIRC, he ended up getting a free rename token and his username got >> reserved.) >> >> Cheers, >> -- >> Philip Newton <[email protected]> >> _______________________________________________ >> dw-discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss >> > _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
