OSM user names shortened for discourse?

Hi, I post this feedback for the german speaking user.
This user mentioned, that his nickname is shortened to “Taxifahrer_in_Hambu”, while this is his fully expanded OSM name:

Do you see any way to surround this limitation?

BTW: Thanks for the great work and signup with OSM :slight_smile:

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Max username length by default setup is 20 characters, that’s probably the reason.

@Firefishy @TomH what’s osm.org character limitation, should we sync both?

Note that usernames on Discourse can’t have a space.

We require names to be between 3 and 255 characters in length.

For some reason my username here on discourse is user1 :muscle::rofl: (someone asked me to change that, but I missed that notification. email me: amanda@technomancy.org). Since OSM usernames can change, “syncing” might be complicated.

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It seems username longer than 60 can become problematic not only for UI but for the API endpoints

Also, usernames under 3 characters can also mess with the DB

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If you logout and back in then it should force your Discourse name to match the OSM one.

While the database does contain all lengths between 3 and 255 there is no length over 128 with more than 10 users.

There are around 5000 active accounts over 60 characters though, around 1650 over 80 characters, and around 75000 that are only 3 characters. Many of the very long ones may be spam.

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Should we play safe and see if there is more demand to increase the length limit here before taking any decisions that might affect the DB or API?

I tried that and it didn’t change anything. :woman_shrugging:t2:

I don’t mind if my username is user1. :slightly_smiling_face: ᎔ᔐ âżá”˜á”á”‡á”‰Êł ᔒⁿᔉ

It is good for us on the forum to explore what is and isn’t possible with this software, so we can explain it to others. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Probably the reason is that Discourse detects that your osm username is a combination of unicode characters and defaults to a safe name instead :sweat_smile:

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Hmm another thing seems to be the normalization of the OSM user names. My nick !i! becomes _i1 and the label shows it in the right way. Not nessesary a big issue, but to mention (and it’s autocomplete) rely on the (slightly wrong) discourse nickname.

That seems related with no special characters as part of the nickname.

I keep surprising myself about how osm.org is so permissive with nicknames and that hasn’t resulted in major issues with the DB, APIs or external apps :sweat_smile:

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it must be said that Amanda’s username is
 special :laughing:

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Hmm, that’s not ideal for a global audience. Imagine your Chinese user name ends up as “user2”: https://community.openstreetmap.org/u/user2/summary

Detailed validation logic

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It seems there are a few options for whitelisting some unicode characters and a warning about not going too broad:

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Is the problem with user names longer than 20 characters solved in meantime or will OSM names longer than that still be cut down to 20 when registrating here?

@Firefishy what’s your recommendation here?

@Firefishy
Any news regarding this issue 
??.. sorry to bother you but I believe it would be helpful if every interested user would be able to register with their OSM name and not only those with names shorter than 20 characters and not containing certain unicode.

You aren’t fluent in Ogham script, really? :upside_down_face:

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I am unsure what the solution is. The restriction are built into discourse and are unlikely to be easy to override.