Characters allowed in User Name

Geoff AB6BT

I see that a number of user names have a hyphen in them. My user name on the previous site had a hyphen. Now I get a message the that character is not allowed.

How are some managing to use the hyphen?

Tim - W4TME

@Geoff AB6BT See the Message Board post, Some comments related to editing your profile for the answer to your question.

Tim - W4TME

@Geoff AB6BT You can use an underscore or a space.

And this post is a question where you wanted an answer. In the future, please select the post option of Q&A. See the message Board post Using New Q&A (Question & Answer) Feature for more details. I have gone ahead and converted the port to a Q&A.

Geoff AB6BT

Thanks Tim. OK, that begs the question...How are some names using a hyphen??

Geoff AB6BT

I still do not understand why some user names have hyphens allowed. My previous user name had a hyphen but when I migrated to the new site I get a message that there was an unallowed character. So I changed it.

It's really not a big deal. I'd still like to understand how it is that some user names have hyphens.

Tim - W4TME

@Geoff AB6BT

You said...

I still do not understand why some user names have hyphens allowed.

In the HelpDesk post I referenced, Some comments related to editing your profile, the following info is provided:

When we migrated the only Community members to the new Community, we migrated your user account data too. This included the email address you used to access the community and your username.

However, there are a few differences between the old and new Communities. One of those is the Username allowable characters and enforcement of unique usernames.

The migration process allowed the creation of usernames without the current username character filter enabled to ensure a complete data transfer. However the user name may still contain unallowed characters or may be a duplicate someone else's username.