Can non-ASCII Characters Be Recognized On Usernames?

[GeoLuz]

There have been many unworkable URLs on AS that won't allow you to access a player's page due to non-ASCII characters such as Cyrillic characters. There also have been characters used to create fake accounts. Can the problem of unworkable URLs be fixed for Audiosurf Air?

[blue_h3x]

Possible solutions:

1) All non a-z A-Z 0-9 characters removed (can be done with regex). This includes spaces (the PHP command trim() will remove spaces at the start/end of names(strings))

2) All non  a-z A-Z 0-9 characters converted to their URL safe form

3) A hash derived from the username used to view the profile.

Number 3 would be the easiest to implement that would allow anything to be entered, however creates none human recognisable URLs.
Number 1 would be the easiest that would leave the URLs as human readable.

[Lebon14]

Personnally, your #2 is also a very good solution.  For exemple, a space's safe code is "%20".  Another exemple, "愛" (Ai; Love in Japanese) is "%E6%84%9B".  That can be a lot of work if you are going to make a databse out of this but, thanks to this page, I was able to offer "Ai"'s code :
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

[blue_h3x]

#2 is easier than you'd expect http://php.net/manual/en/function.urlencode.php

Although it does create a bit of a mess for fancy characters.

[S.]

Although it does create a bit of a mess for fancy characters.

At least it allows us to 'customize' our nicknames. Though it's debatable to what extend you would want that. Personally I get pretty annoyed by people who use odd things in their Steam display name.

I'd vote for option 2. This will make some urls still human recognizable, while option 3 messes up all urls.

We'll see what Dylan does.

[GeoLuz]

Although it does create a bit of a mess for fancy characters.

At least it allows us to 'customize' our nicknames. Though it's debatable to what extend you would want that. Personally I get pretty annoyed by people who use odd things in their Steam display name.

I'd vote for option 2. This will make some urls still human recognizable, while option 3 messes up all urls.

We'll see what Dylan does.

I would also vote for option 2 for the same reason stated by S. I wanted to create this thread to begin a worthy discussion in hopes of preventing this issue from carrying over into the upcoming game.

[Passerby]

everyone going to hate me for this, but why not just use a practical username?

[NovaTerran]

everyone going to hate me for this, but why not just use a practical username?

came here to say this

[S.]

everyone going to hate me for this, but why not just use a practical username?

Some people feel rebellish and don't want to

[Passerby]

ya guess this is the interwebs where people need to needlessly complicate simple things.

[blue_h3x]

ya guess this is the interwebs where people need to needlessly complicate simple things.

Hence option 1.

[S.]

ya guess this is the interwebs where people need to needlessly complicate simple things.

I share your opinion, however, I can understand someone from Russia/Greece wants his name to be actually Russian/Greek without having to Latinize it.

[metaLsurfeR]

everyone going to hate me for this, but why not just use a practical username?

If I remember correctly, AS was released both in english and russian. And if a game comes with a russian translation I'd expect it to be able to deal correctly with Cyrillic letters.

[blue_h3x]

everyone going to hate me for this, but why not just use a practical username?

If I remember correctly, AS was released both in english and russian. And if a game comes with a russian translation I'd expect it to be able to deal correctly with Cyrillic letters.

The game does, it's the website that doesn't

[GeoLuz]

If I remember correctly, AS was released both in english and russian. And if a game comes with a russian translation I'd expect it to be able to deal correctly with Cyrillic letters.

AS has been able to deal correctly with Cyrillic letters for names of artists and song titles for the scoreboards. However, the game has not been able to deal correctly with Cyrillic letters for usernames. If you click on usernames with Cyrillic letters to access their pages you will find that their links or broken or unworkable.