Hi all,

I'm not a big fan of censorship, but I don't think was this what the nickname system was meant to do: http://warlight.net/Profile.aspx?p=192568291

It becomes cumbersome to refer to this person. There are of course ways, like the one used in the subject of this post and just calling him by his color in a game, but I still think this is nothing but an attempt to confuse. There are other ways to confuse your opponent (like choosing a color close to that of the neutrals), but more than those other ways, I feel this is something that makes no sense to allow because it has nothing but negative effects.

I would suggest requiring a minimum of a single alpha-numeric character (or even a non-whitespace character). One could even get that up to three alphanumeric characters, but one is the very minimum in order to have people be referable to.

cool

Won't happen. Surprisingly enough, even swastikas are allowed in nicknames so i doubt that this will even be considered.

oggy, I don't know about how likely this is to happen, and I don't care much for pure speculation. However, I would like to contest your argument.

Disallowing things like swastikas and other offensive names is what I'd call censorship. You can argue all day long about whether it's still censorship when it's about trying to make sure people do not get offended by those seeking to do nothing but offend people, but at the end of it, you are still telling people what they can and cannot say (in their username). This also brings up the question of where to draw the line - what to allow and what not to allow. Besides the ideological problems, it also brings a practical problem to the table. If you start making a list of disallowed names, people will start working their way around the filter. Through intentional misspellings there are a million variations of each offensive name. Each time your filter gets more sophisticated, so do the people out to offend.

Requiring people to have a name that isn't nothing has none of those problems. You aren't trying to decide what people can and can't say. You can make an argument about how you are disallowing people to say nothing, but it's not an unfair requirement to ask people to have a name in order to be part of this website. The drawing of the line may be slightly arbitrary (I mentioned both 1 and three characters above, which should show in what way), but the line can be drawn easily and then be there solidly and without any borderline cases. Lastly, the practical problem isn't there either. Perhaps this needs a little thinking about what to do with foreign characters in names, but in the end, you can easily implement this in a way that people can't get around it. As such, I believe your comparison to allowing swastikas does not apply to this situation.