That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users
Thanks for the clarification, but imagining it's pretty easy that this could just be a bug, e.g. they knew they wanted to prevent future usernames from having "clyde", and maybe even realized some existing clydes would be grandfathered in, but didn't realize it would prevent existing clydes from updating anything else on their profile.
Amazon: Alexa
Microsoft: Cortana
Apple: Siri
Discord: Clyde
Google: Google
https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2019/07/03/google-...
https://news.yahoo.com/parents-forced-change-name-6-18055441...
Tragic.
I disagree. The username can be clyde_discord/clyde_bot and the display name could just be "Clyde". Then the username Clyde wouldn't be taken, and the users would be able to still message the bot and not be confused.
Though I personally really dislike simple human names for bots because it sounds cheesy and dumb.
I'm obliged to link you to 'falsehoods programmers believe about names' now. I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Also names are part of human culture, and Alexa for example has been in use for a very long time. There are valid reasons for names to die off in a single generation (eg adolf) but this is not a reason that our culture gains anything from imo.
I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.
..."then change them", as someone might say. But that article seems to be mostly about the edge-cases. I don't think someone named Clyde is an edge-case, nor would someone named Bonnie, for that matter.
Here's an easy lower bound, for the context of avoiding collisions: The name has to have been used by at least two different humans.
Or to get closer to a reasonable bound, 100 humans.
I wonder whether there are constraints that made it difficult to implement this functionality in another way, or this is just a bad design decision.
It's not always the wrong choice to mingle identifiers of different types, but I think often people err on the side of convenience (/ laziness) instead of thinking through all of the potential issues.
So it seems almost impossible that this is some technical limitation but rather Discord cracking down on a common deception tactic.
It reminded me of the "our database schema doesn't allow people with the name Jeffrey": https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944
I’ve got to imagine that some people named Alexa find it unfortunate and invasive that suddenly their name is used everywhere. At least “Siri” and “Hey Google” are less popular names for people.
Such lists are usually kept secret, but there are a few open source word lists that people can adopt for their services, for example, https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames.
Why do their messages have to appear the same as humans?
If bots should all operate in a distinctive space, give it that space.
Mind you architectural foresight is hard so maybe they'll get there.
Reserved words in SQL sometimes get blocked as well as things like too many singles quotes or an odd number of single quotes. I've seen the name "Walter" blocked on many forms over the years.
The worst part is that the sender just gets sent to a security or generic page with no idea why, often losing the message they created.
https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-the...
Poor Clint.
"Name on cake must not be Clint"
> The Scunthorpe problem is unintentional blocking [...] because [...] text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an [...] unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.