How should the 'user name' used on the Internet change in the future?



Whenever you create an account on an internet service such as Twitter or Facebook, you always have to register your 'user name', but try to register a user name that contains characters that cannot be used or has already been registered. Some people may have seen an error and then. Engineer Mr.

Lord talks about such restrictions on user names and what the future user names should be.

Identity Beyond Usernames – Lord i/o
https://lord.io/blog/2020/usernames/

At the beginning of Twitter, which has many users as a text-based SNS, the main posting interface was SMS. The character limit of 140 characters that was previously adopted in Twitter is also derived from the character limit of SMS, and even now that Twitter has been used on smartphones and PCs, it is possible to change the format freely on Twitter. You cannot use rich text. However, today's Twitter users can use Unicode to change the font with a text generator and use emoji to make rich expressions.



Although the content posted on Twitter can be expressed in Unicode, only the user name remains the same as in the days when SMS was the main platform, and the limitation was ``a string of up to 15 letters consisting of alphabets and numbers from a to z''. Mr. Lord. Many other websites such as GitHub and Facebook have similar restrictions, and even message services mainly used in China such as QQ and WeChat use numbers instead of Kanji for user identification. That. Lord explains why Unicode cannot be used for user names by taking ' DNS ' which is the world's largest name system as an example.

If you access the ASCII code 'epic.com' with Firefox, the website of the healthcare software company ' Epic Systems ' will be displayed.



When I accessed the Unicode string 'еріс.com', the website ' Epic Games ' was displayed.



As such, it is difficult to distinguish two domain names, ASCII code and Unicode, from the address bar, which can lead to phishing scams. In case of Chrome, Punycode that Unicode is converted to a string that can be used in DNS is displayed, but the essence of the problem is ``I think that text that is visually the same is the same in bytes understood by the computer 'Is there,' Lord points out.



Even if the user name is limited to English letters, there is still a problem with 'change of user name'. For example, if you change the username in your GitHub account, the repository with the old username will be redirected to the new username, but a third party with the exact same username as the old username will get a GitHub account and have the exact same name. If you create a repository, redirects will not work. Instagram also has a specification that if you change the user name until 2015, all mentions to yourself will disappear, and even within Google, it is assumed that the user name used will not change, so it will take many days to change But there are many problems with changing user names, Lord says.

The solution to the problem of changing the user name is Discord, a chat application with 250 million users. Discord manages user names on a single server, and since it is almost impossible to collide user names and search for valid user names, the problem was avoided by eliminating the uniqueness of user names. By adding the identification number generated by Discord to the user name specified by the user, it is possible for multiple users to have the same user name.


by Underway In Ireland

In 2017, Slack, the same chat application as Discord, decided to completely abolish the user name and adopt only the display name. The user can mention using the display name, and if the display name is duplicated, an error will be displayed and the user will be prompted to select the person to send the mention. The progress of user names by Discord and Slack was made possible because we were able to build a multifunctional text editing screen that can perform auto-completion without depending on the uniqueness of the text.



Not only user names rely on text uniqueness, but there are many other examples, such as program variables and file system directory names. Discord and Slack show that it is important not to modify the text itself but to provide a unique identifier separately in order to break through the limitation of the user name, but at the same time, ``In plain text editing screen , Confusing a username as an identity with a username as a label,' said Lord. “This is not a text issue, it's a text editing issue,” he commented.

in Software,   Web Service, Posted by darkhorse_log