I disagree that discriminators fix the rare username problem. The way I see it, they just move the problem.
Using discriminators to stop people fighting over "Mike" just makes them fight over "Mike#0001" instead. Discriminators do not fix the problem. Granted you now have "Mike#1337" and "Mike#0420" to contend with, but how is that any different to "Mike1337" or "Mike420"?
If there's scarcity of anything, people will fight over it. No matter how unappealing you make it. You could go all-out and turn the usernames into UUIDs, but then people would fight over the ones ending in lots of zeros.
I don't think preventing username squatting is a valid reason to keep discriminators. Even if it were a valid reason, it's hardly an important one. The issue is innocuous at most, and the only people who care are the ones assigning artificial value to these "rare" usernames in the first place.
Good, I hate those four random digits on the end of the globally unique username I've been using for something like the past twenty years. Every time someone wants to connect to me on Discord I have to fire the damn thing up and see what those stupid numbers are.
It's a decent solution to the problem of people who want to be FirstnameL or FirstnameLCity on the Internet, but if you've taken the time to choose a sufficiently unique handle, it's just annoying.
Lots of services limit usernames to a certain range of characters, but some don't. However, there's tons of invisible unicode characters that you can use instead, so even without this one, the problem would still exist.
Smart that they force users to add 2 numbers to the end of the username to avoid “high end” usernames. I wanted to grab my first name but ended up with firstname.01
Since identifiers like usernames are seen by people they are susceptible to homograph attack and _do_ deserve to be treated a bit more carefully. Also you probably dont want usernames like n????????¨¨?¨´????__???i?????¯??¨??g?????"°?°?~"??????_????????h????^????????¯?????????t?????´??¯???????f?`????????????????_???l??????y????????????????????
Completely agree. I loved Discord's unique and wonderful discriminator system for usernames. I imagine their current system would have worked if they had:
1) Only allowed ASCII characters without any case sensitivity
2) Required users to pick their own discriminator when they create an account, rather than having a default one automatically assigned to you (that you can change later)
But I'm sure they looked at the difficulty of changing that and what it would mean to blow away everyone's current username and replace it with a mostly-identical looking system and decided that would be awful.
It solves the awareness problem by making them choose it when they create their account. If you need more, you can have a fun little animation that presents the finalized username + discriminator after it's created. Or show them how to add Tom from Myspace.
I figured the "busy usernames" issue was a truly trivial problem solved by making the discriminator a 0 to 5-digit alphanumeric.
Because the discriminator would be chosen by the user, it would only be as cumbersome as sharing a normal username or email.
What I felt discord really needed was a way to send an invite link to be friends.
Totally understandable - we don't want to exclude you based on the number of characters in your desired username. We just don't have a good set of all the words we need to reserve upfront - what we really want to avoid is ever forcing someone to change their username because of a conflict like this.
We'll see what we can do to allow shorter usernames without ending up in this situation. Thanks for the feedback.
Would it be ridiculous to suggest that this is no different to requiring all usernames to be composed of CJK characters? That would be inconvenient and exclusive, no?
(also, a nitpick: "just ascii" is still the wrong approach, since you probably don't want people putting BEL or NUL in their usernames)
> You could make your username be some random hash?
Why not? 285e5c0452918bf77370c4a013317be4cf5e1ff690cc33a7346e837f59cdca58@foobarbaz.invalid is, I believe, a valid email address. If that's too long, you can always truncate it.
Regarding discriminators: have 5-digit discriminators for usernames used by more than 10000 accounts
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