Unexpected Twinkle username restrictions.
Username that worked before is now invalid. (Previously used square brackets and there was no problem with this.)
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Inappropriate?Hey [Si]Dragon,
Thanks for the report. It involves the use of special characters. We're working on it. -
ed, excellent! Glad to hear I will get to use it again! (Pretty tied to making the "si" look like the atomic symbol for silicon.) -
Acutally, I'm sorry to get your hopes up. We're removing the use of special characters, soon you'll have to change your username. -
Inappropriate?Ed what about the use of a space between screen name. Need to be reset:Fizzy Lifting
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What bugs me most is that there is nothing "special" about characters like spaces and brackets, and I see no reason to reserve characters for mutable, public-facing names. (Static, unique identifiers are another story.) It appears Twinkle user names do not line up with those in Twitter, so I do not understand imposing similar constraints. Naturally, I am speculating here and I am not trying to slam the developers (their work is absolutely outstanding, and their participation here is above and beyond). But, I believe tightening restrictions after the fact is harmful to usability. The "least surprise" principle is important to follow. -
Inappropriate?whoa [Si]dragon I don't know what the hell you just said (mutable, public facing names, static unique identifiers) but you sound pissed. Awesome dude! Couldn't have said it better myself (had I known what you said anyway)
I’m amused
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Oh, not at all pissed! Again, I think Tapulous has some excellent engineers and great products, and I cannot be angry that this free product does not work exactly as I wish. Just trying to provide the developers with some constructive feedback about how users are affected (although, possibly being too vocal about it). To put this another way, dialing back functionality can confuse and frustrate users. It is risky even when done to satisfy practical engineering concerns. -
Inappropriate?Hey, thanks for the feedback. We do appreciate it. The reasoning is: if you want to send a message to John Doe, you'd type in this-- "@John Doe Hi jon" -- it needs to know when the username stops and the message begins. The spaces in usernames cause problems for this.
Everything works if you tap a message to reply, because then we know the unique id. I do agree with your point about doing it after the fact -- so we're trying to make it as seamless as possible.
Also - we've implemented a fix so you can still login for the time being, let me know if that's not working for you.
1 person says
this answers the question
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Ah-hah, that makes total sense. (Now here come some rambling ideas.)
I thought rainbow table resolution would fix that case. However, naive algorithms that progressively test possible usernames can fail when names with prefixes exist and within certain messages. To elaborate on your stated case: assuming users "John Smith" and "John Smith Jones", messages like "@John Smith Jones called and says 'hello'." defeat resolution. (Is the user addressing "John Smith" and discussing "Jones" or addressing "John Smith Jones" and discussing an implied subject?)
Perhaps when publishing their tweets, users could be prompted to manually resolve ambiguities? (I am tempted to believe this edge case is rare.) Considering the previous sample message, users could be prompted with dialogues containing spinner controls that list possible matches. Another option, although I think less desirable, might be augmented autocompletion. That may, however, require hidden control characters to delimit the resulting username from the message.
Naturally, there are big downsides. This may all incur excessive database load. (At least with Twitter, far more writes occur than reads, leaving little room for any additional access overhead.) The additional network roundtrips also increase chances for the transaction to fail. -
Thanks for the ideas [Si]Dragon. Since its causing problems for users, we went forward with a backend only fix. In the future, we're looking to update the client to allow more functionality as you mentioned -- like options to decide where the message goes, etc... -
Inappropriate?@ [Si]dragon, what do you do for a living? You sound super smart. I don't know you just said again but I am sure you make decent money. What field of study did you go into? I might want to check it out. Not sure what I want to do with my life.
I’m excited
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