User Names and White-Spaces [closed]

Question

In past many years I have registered on various applications and platforms hosted online or offline.

Why white-spaces are not allowed in User Names as spaces are very natural to names and most of the computing systems can handle them efficiently.

(Many people can raise similar questions about other special characters which are illegal. But their case is far more understandable as they are not even natural to real world naming schemes. And surely!)

Answer 1

One subtle problem related to spaces in user names is that the space character is "invisible" and two consecutive spaces may look very similar to a single space. Errors that arise from entering two instead of one space can be hard to spot and this is one reason to disallow spaces all together.

Some systems may disallow spaces but still allow a non-breaking space. A smart user can use this fact to include a space in his user name.

Answer 2

I think in reality this is probably one of those conventions that needs to be broken. Most systems now deal with a lot of sophisticated data and are used to correctly processing text which includes spaces. I was delighted to discover that fogbugz (another plug) will accept your email address, your username or your real name, as you have entered it; as your username when you log on.

This is simply a convention that is still around from the days of 8 letter file names and probably also 8 letter user names. I would suggest you allow it in your web app and let the world follow you. :)