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...and possibly elsewhere on the network, but I really think it should at least be allowed on Chinese Language.

I and many others are not able to use our names on Chinese Stack Exchange without romanising them (for example, my name is 赵永) because such names are less than 3 characters, which is very common for Chinese names.

Can we please allow such names, at least on sites that are dedicated to Chinese language and culture?

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  • 1
    Usernames are filtered with the .NET \w character class which includes any Unicode letter categories (Ll, Lu, Lt, Lo, Lm), connecting characters (Pc, connecting punctuation, underscores really) and numbers (Nd), with a dash of hyphen, space and apostrophe thrown in. I guess Chinese glyphs are not included in that.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Nov 14, 2014 at 12:30
  • @MartijnPieters I more or less understand the technical reasons why this occurs, my main concern is about creating positive impact for Chinese Stack Exchange users. :-)
    – Chris Down
    Nov 14, 2014 at 12:31
  • Sure, just documenting the exact rules as they stand now.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Nov 14, 2014 at 12:32
  • 2
    U+8d75 赵 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-8D75 is Letter Other (Lo), so it should be allowed to be used as the start of a name. It seems the only limitation you are facing is the 3 character minimum.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Nov 14, 2014 at 12:34
  • @MartijnPieters No worries, I appreciate your input. I believe this policy exists to avoid people using Unicode characters of significance that might cause problems (for example, adding a moderator symbol, or sending text directionality information). I don't think there are Chinese characters that would do that, but I'd be interested in hearing insights in case this was intentional.
    – Chris Down
    Nov 14, 2014 at 12:35
  • 2
    Chinese characters are allowed as they are generally Lo (Other Letter) characters. See Using Japanese letters in the username as well, where Japanese Katakana was used, which are in the same Lo category.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Nov 14, 2014 at 12:36
  • 1
    @MartijnPieters That's my bad -- I tried "赵永/Chris Down" and the real reason it rejected it was because of the "/", not "赵" at the beginning. Too bad that the error message ("Display Name can only contain letters, digits, spaces, apostrophes or hyphens and must start with a letter or digit") is extremely vague about the reason you weren't allowed to use that name (Chinese characters are not "letters"), which makes it a little confusing. :-( I'll update the question.
    – Chris Down
    Nov 14, 2014 at 12:39
  • 1
    Sorry, Chinese characters do indeed have the Unicode General Category = Other Letter character property, which means that they are indeed gc=Letter, and so you will lose your battle trying to say that they are not letters. Unicode says they are, and that is all that matters here. If you want a two-character username, choose two characters from above the BMP, since the SE character-counting code is broken (they’re counting code units not code points, how embarrassing!) and because it erroneously counts two such characters as four, you will sneak past the guardians at the gate.
    – tchrist
    Nov 15, 2014 at 2:18
  • 5
    This has been on my list for a while, but I unfortunately got sidetracked by other projects. The goal here is to make 2+ characters the new minimum name length standard and I'll see if I can bump this up on my todo list in the near future.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Aug 1, 2015 at 22:01
  • @AnnaLear Awesome, thank you!
    – Chris Down
    Aug 1, 2015 at 22:16
  • This feature is also requested on Stack Overflow for Japanese: ja.meta.stackoverflow.com/q/1655/19110
    – nekketsuuu
    Jun 10, 2019 at 8:18
  • Related restriction: We cannot notify a user with less-than-three-letter display name in comments: meta.stackexchange.com/a/35913/341401
    – nekketsuuu
    Jun 10, 2019 at 8:22

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