cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/10497245

Hi,

For websites I’ve always restricted username to use Apostrophe ' and " and some times even space . If a website necessitate special character then I prefer to create an additional DB field ~DisplayName.

It’s easier to forbid the use of Apostrophe, otherwise you will have to escape also your search query to match what has been recorded in the DB.

On the topic I’ve this https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/202902/is-single-quote-filtering-nonsense

But if you have better documentation feel free to share :)

Thanks

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    That’s great if every external library and application also expects usernames that can contain every character, but mostly they won’t. If you’re very good about testing, you might catch every instance where they don’t, but that doesn’t mean you can necessarily fix them / get them fixed.

    Plus, there’s just displaying them. If you have sane limits on usernames, you can have sane user management tools that do things that list users vs. storage used, or whatever. If a username might contain backspace characters or who knows what else, all those tools have to be made more complicated too.

    In addition, there’s user support. If you allow usernames to contain zalgo text, you’re going to have far more users needing support because they’re having trouble entering their username. You’re also going to give your support people nightmares trying to help those users out.

    “Ok, I see you entered your username as “s̶u̵g̶a̴r̴_̵i̷n̴_̵y̶o̸u̷r̸-̴t̴e̷a̴” not “s̶u̵g̵a̶r̷_̶i̴n̸_̸y̵o̴u̵r̷_̸t̵e̵a̷”, could you try re-entering that username and see if that fixes the problem?”