[skrebbel]

The article has examples about people naming themselves "Аdministrator". That's not about machine-readable identifiers, it's about display names. This entire subthread is either people missing that and thinking they're talking about login usernames and the likes, in which case I don't disagree, or people actually believing it's OK to limit people's screen names to a-zA-Z0-9 in which case I say, that's deeply imperialistic and a super shit thing to do.

[tsimionescu]

It depends on the intention. If this is about a unified international community, like a group of contributors to a Open Source Project, or like HN, then there is no reason to allow general unicode identifiers.

If the project is instead a more general solution intended for many independent communities that may well be country-specific, then yes, it should allow general Unicode display names. It should probably still help restrict this per community, so that a Chinese community doesn't get confusables with Japanese-only characters (though Han unification probably happens to protect from that), or a Cyrillic community doesn't get confusables with Latin characters.

[popcornricecake]

Is HN "deeply imperialistic and super shit" too? Or is it okay because there's no option to set a display name?