Similarly, if you're going to create an identifier for yourself that is supposed to be usable in an international context, you'll have to use the lowest common denominator that is acceptable in that context - and that happens to be a-zA-Z0-9. Why the Latin alphabet and numerals and not, say, Arabic, you might ask? Because Chinese and Indian and Arabic speakers are far more likely to be familiar with the Latin alphabet than with each other's writing systems.
If the project is instead a more general solution intended for many independent communities that may well be country-specific, then yes, it should allow general Unicode display names. It should probably still help restrict this per community, so that a Chinese community doesn't get confusables with Japanese-only characters (though Han unification probably happens to protect from that), or a Cyrillic community doesn't get confusables with Latin characters.
If you're saying that "José" should be accepted as an username, shouldn't "Борис" or "김" or "金" also be valid?
It makes sense to restrict the alphabet for things like usernames that should be unique, should be easy to read for security reasons and should be correctly handled by various types of backend software.
I'm not from the US and my name isn't ASCII, but I wouldn't mind spelling it with the English alphabet, even in a name field.
I also don't understand how English has 26 letters, but letters like "é" in "José" or "ï" in "naïve" appear as normal letters. And if I write "Jose" instead, it would read as offensive. In my language that uses Cyrillic, the letters of the alphabet are all the letters we use, period. It would just be wrong to borrow a letter from another alphabet, even if it's the same script, just because someone's name includes it in their language. I have a friend from a neighboring country that changed one of his Cyrillic letters when he came to my country. I would do the same if I went to his country and they didn't have a letter we have.
>This is extremely important. Failure to comply will lead to termination of your service with no refund, criminal prosecution, our CEO calling you in tears and a hitman being informed about your last known location
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Validation error: "First name" contains invalid characters.
And special features to mark cyrillic or other for-me-dangerous characters.