User Names are Case-Sensitive

From sasCommunity

By Howles on Sat Apr 07, 2007 11:37 pm

It seems that user names are case-sensitive, at least after the first character. I discovered that when I tried to send a message to DonH, which failed until I made the "h" lower case.

I am Howles, but I just created a new account as HOWLES.

This seems like an undesirable situation. Can it be changed?

Feel free to blow away the HOWLES account along the way.

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By Donh(sysop) on Mon Apr 09, 2007 11:43 am

User accounts can not be deleted. That is part of the wiki model. You can't delete. You can rename and you can move. We can set up a redirect so that anyone who visits the HOWLES home page will end up at the Howles home page. Just add this text to your HOWLES homes page to do that:

1. REDIRECT User:Howles

And case sensitive names is the way of this world and not easily changed (it at all).

You are correct that the first character must be upper case - that is true for everything in a wiki (user names, category name, page/article names, etc.)

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By TobyDunn on Mon Apr 09, 2007 12:44 pm

Don ,

The inability to delete things seems liked a flawed model. While one wouldnt want to delete 99.9 percent of things there will always arise the case of something that needs to be deleted if for nothing else than say someone comes along with well profane very sick off topic entry somewhere. Who is going to do the cleaning or are we doomed to just editing thing entry and living with a dead page.

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By Donh(sysop) on Mon Apr 09, 2007 5:45 pm

I have to disagree. The inability to delete a page means that links will NEVER EVER be broken if they ever worked. That is one of the basic tenets of collaborative sites. Once you create an article/page, you really have no way of knowing what links to it. So there is no way to update all the places that reference it. Thus, the concept is to keep it.

Of course, you can delete all the text. And the page remains dormant until someone decides to create a new page with that same name. They then see that it had a history that is now moot and the page/article name can be re-used.

I had the same first reaction you did. But after letting the Web 2.0 concepts sink in, it actually makes a lot of sense.

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By Howles on Mon Apr 09, 2007 9:30 pm

There might even be compelling legal reasons to remove something. I'm rather confident that an administrator or some other specially priveleged individual can get in and clean out something which simply must be cleaned out.

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By Sbb on Tue Apr 10, 2007 10:22 am

Not only are the User Names case-sensitive but they are automatically proper-cased, that is the first character was automatically changed to uppercase, even though I specified a lowercase user name string "sbb". Not a positive first-impression but I'll have to live with it, I suppose.

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By Donh(sysop) on Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:59 pm

The issue with the first character is a restriction of the wiki software and is widely known. There is some discussion of it at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Case_insensitivity. Once/if the software addresses this issue we should be able to take advantage of it. But until then we will have to deal with it as best we can.

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By DavidJ on Tue May 15, 2007 9:03 pm

It took me a while to realise I could sign in at one place and not at another, because I used a lower case name at one place.

Is it possible to extend the "user name is unknown" message on the login page to hint that the first character must be upper case, and the use rname is case sensitive?

Kind regards

David

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