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After reading Is there a policy on the use of emojis or emoticons? Here comes another question.
Sometimes I face users who don't have even a single character of English in their usernames.

For example:

User: 910697 enter image description here

User: 910677 enter image description here

While it is the right of a person to have their username whatever they want but on the other hand sometimes it makes difficult to address those users in comment section. I know we can just copy and paste their usernames if we don't have those characters on keyboard but again that's not what I'm trying to ask. So is there any SE's policy regarding only special/Non-English characters in their username?

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    +1: I don’t want a policy, but asking this question is a good thing. Please don’t downvote if you disagree with the idea, rather add an answer stating this fact.
    – dessert
    Commented Jan 5, 2019 at 11:20
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    @dessert By policy I mean some instructions or warnings given to new user. When I was new I remember there was nothing like that but am still doubtful. Don't know why I still got a downvote. I'll rather propose a feature that system should accept English characters only for the usernames at least on English only sites.
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jan 5, 2019 at 11:25
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    Related on MSE: If we reject foreign language posts, why do we allow non-Latin/symbol user names? and Dealing with “difficult” usernames in targeted comments
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Jan 5, 2019 at 18:17
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    You mean "Latin alphabet" not "English alphabet".
    – Lexible
    Commented Jan 7, 2019 at 3:05
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    @Lexible It's correct to call it "English alphabet", since English uses a Latin script, but no diacritics like grave (è) and umlaut (ë) or nonstandard letters like sharp s (ß) and thorn (þ).
    – wjandrea
    Commented Jan 8, 2019 at 17:21
  • And you probably mean "letters", not "alphabets", unless you're Indian.
    – TRiG
    Commented Jan 11, 2019 at 12:42
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    @TRiG How would that make any difference? And what if I say I'm?
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jan 11, 2019 at 13:18

2 Answers 2

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Not as far as I know, no. There are many usernames across the network with non ASCII characters. There's even one, particularly annoying, instance of a user whose name consists entirely of unicode whitespace characters.

While I agree that it can indeed be cumbersome to communicate with these users if you don't happen to have the same keyboard layout as them, on the other hand and as you point out, it seems reasonable for people to be able to write their name in their own language without transliterating. Given that we insist on having everything on the site in English since that's the official language of Ask Ubuntu, allowing people to at least use their own language for their names, even if that makes it slightly harder for us, seems like a fair compromise.

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  • Yeah seems like a fair compromise.
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jan 6, 2019 at 14:29
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Assuming Unicode provided a nice standardised method to do so, it would be good to ensure that all usernames include printable characters, to exclude usernames consisting entirely of either whitespace or non-printing characters. Such a test might include normalising whitespace, trimming whitespace and comparing the result to an empty string.

As to whether to allow usernames without letter characters (ie, only symbols or emoji) as long as this isn't currently a huge problem I'm happy to leave this unpoliced.

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