check if a name seems "human"?

Question

I have an online RPG game which I'm taking seriously. Lately I've been having problem with users making bogus characters with bogus names, just a bunch of different letters. Like Ghytjrhfsdjfnsdms, Yiiiedawdmnwe, Hhhhhhhhhhejejekk. I force them to change names but it's becoming too much. What can I do about this?

Could I somehow check so at least you can't use more than 2 of the same letter beside each other?? And also maybe if it contains vowels

Answer 1

I would recommend concentrating your energy on building a user interface that makes it brain-dead easy to list all new names to an administrator, and a big fat "force to rename" mechanism that minimizes the admin's workload, rather than trying to define the incredibly complex and varied rules that make a name (and program a regular expression to match them!).

Update - one thing comes to mind, though: Second Life used to allow you to freely specify a first name (maybe they check against a database of first names, I don't know) and then gives you a selection of a few hundred pre-defined last names to choose from. For an online RPG, that may already be enough.

Answer 2

You could use a metaphone implementation and then look for "unnatural" patterns:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.metaphone.php

This is the PHP function for metaphone string generation. You pass in a string and it returns the phonetic representation of the text. You could, in theory, pass a large number of "human" names and then store a database of valid combinations of phonemes. To test a questionable name, just see if the combinations of phonemes are in the database.

Hope this helps!