Username cannot contain 'clyde'

[fire]

The key point here that was hard to find is that they and others had a username containing Clyde set already, and now can't update anything else about their profile because their username has come to be considered invalid.

That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users

[hn_throwaway_99]

> That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users

Thanks for the clarification, but imagining it's pretty easy that this could just be a bug, e.g. they knew they wanted to prevent future usernames from having "clyde", and maybe even realized some existing clydes would be grandfathered in, but didn't realize it would prevent existing clydes from updating anything else on their profile.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Sounds like they're doing a PUT when they should be doing a PATCH.

[plusminusplus]

If you use a + sign in your email, some services accept it at sign up but not later on, when users try to update it.

[userbinator]

This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names (and perhaps distinguished through other means too); if the error was instead "Username cannot contain 'discord'", it'd be more obvious.

[Thorrez]

    Amazon: Alexa
    Microsoft: Cortana
    Apple: Siri
    Discord: Clyde
    Google: Google

Disclosure, I work at Google.

[slg]

I feel bad for all the Alexas and the few Siris out there that have had their names hijacked my a couple of the biggest companies on the planet.

[fsniper]

Oh at first with my cafein lacking early morning brain, I mistakenly parsed it as "Developers should not be able to call their bots regular names". But it's nothing to the bot's name but how it's registered on the system right? So the suggestion is, the username should be discernible from platform users usernames.

[blowski]

Gizmoduck back in the 80s had this worked out. His bot invocation was "Blathering Blathernsikes".

[hn92726819]

> This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names

I disagree. The username can be clyde_discord/clyde_bot and the display name could just be "Clyde". Then the username Clyde wouldn't be taken, and the users would be able to still message the bot and not be confused.

Though I personally really dislike simple human names for bots because it sounds cheesy and dumb.

[jameshart]

This of course rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as a 'regular name'.

I'm obliged to link you to 'falsehoods programmers believe about names' now. I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

[NelsonMinar]

"Clyde is the name used for a fake bot in the client. It responds to specific Built-In slash commands (/timeout, /ban, /kick and /nick), and sends private messages with information or errors". https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Clyde

[ZephyrBlu]

Why is an internal system in the same namespace as users?

I wonder whether there are constraints that made it difficult to implement this functionality in another way, or this is just a bad design decision.

[margana]

It's not. The reason for this is not technical (unless you think they literally filled their user database with every possible username permutation with the word 'clyde' in it). It's to make sure scammers can't use names with these words in it, because it might make more people consider those accounts legitimate.

[taberiand]

It's probably a mix of both. Namespacing often seems to be an afterthought in many systems, and it can be hard to refactor in once an architecture has solidified.

It's not always the wrong choice to mingle identifiers of different types, but I think often people err on the side of convenience (/ laziness) instead of thinking through all of the potential issues.

[tiberious726]

No technical limitations... Look at how blizzard has done "blue text" on their forums for decades (a different presentation-space)

[rozab]

It's really embarrassing if does actually allow visually indistinguishable variations like 'CIyde' or 'Clydе'. Impacting real users, while having zero effect on malicious actors

[est]

Reminds me of a fun bug at RockstarGames's SocialClub

https://twitter.com/tezfunz2/status/1565159942964891649

[saghm]

Interesting!

It reminded me of the "our database schema doesn't allow people with the name Jeffrey": https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944

[smitop]

This happens because Discord has a system bot also named Clyde that mostly tells users when their messages fail to send (among other system messages).

[midasuni]

Why not call it DiscordBot?

[Waterluvian]

It feels like a UX faux pas to pick common names for stuff like this.

I’ve got to imagine that some people named Alexa find it unfortunate and invasive that suddenly their name is used everywhere. At least “Siri” and “Hey Google” are less popular names for people.

[marcyb5st]

On Swissair website there was a time where I couldn't purchase tickets because my name contains the name of a musical instrument. So out there there are people that did worse than that in my personal experience :(

[themaninthedark]

Wait, what? I'm trying to figure out why that would exist but the only thing I can think of is that people were buying a ticket for their instruments rather then checking them and the airline wanted to try and stop the practice.

[tomcam]

You can’t create a Gmail account containing the words support, gmail, google, and several other variations

[jeffbee]

Huh, TIL. Is that documented anywhere? I confirmed that you're right by trying to create a new address, but I've never heard of this rule before.

[gloosx]

So you think it's bad? How about this: I just wanted to create an account there finally and it was suspended without me even entering it once, I also had to pass about 5 captchas to be able to sign-up, no VPNs, clear home IP Some shit-show is going on there right now, dunno

[_carbyau_]

Why don't bots have some other distinction? Like a blue tick or <blink> or some screenreader function?

Why do their messages have to appear the same as humans?

If bots should all operate in a distinctive space, give it that space.

Mind you architectural foresight is hard so maybe they'll get there.

[leduyquang753]

They do have the tick next to their names and yet they still have this nonsense in place anyway.

[83457]

Contact forms for US Senators and Representatives often have surprising issues like this.

Reserved words in SQL sometimes get blocked as well as things like too many singles quotes or an odd number of single quotes. I've seen the name "Walter" blocked on many forms over the years.

The worst part is that the sender just gets sent to a security or generic page with no idea why, often losing the message they created.

[jjice]

That's upsetting, but what else would I expect from a senator's website that's probably been up for 25 years...

[teddyh]

Change your name to “Sue” instead:

https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-the...

[BLKNSLVR]

This just reminds me of the birthday cake for Clint.

Poor Clint.

"Name on cake must not be Clint"

[jxf]

This feels very adjacent to the Scunthorpe problem, except that the blocking is intentional here:

> The Scunthorpe problem is unintentional blocking [...] because [...] text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an [...] unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

[Sophira]

Actually, in this case it's intentional that "Clyde" is blocked. That's the name of the "bot" that error messages on Discord use to make them friendlier.

It's obviously not a good solution, but it's not an example of the Scunthorpe problem.

[anigbrowl]

This is sadly typical of Discord, who treat every problem as a nail even when offered a detailed explanation.

[revskill]

I don't have account on stackoverflow or reddit because their authentication system is broken to me.

[vitiral]

Does the bot use every possible permutation of "Clyde"? It must be every Clyde that can ever exist?

[rabuse]

Apparently it's do deal with fraudulent uses for their internal bot.

[djmips]

Another bad case of co-opting a common word in tech - here with more than just annoying results.