Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Character Name Restrictions

I'm wondering if there's any reason for the 3 character minimum on names. I recently made a character called µ (the Greek letter Mu, after the friction coefficient used in physics calculations) and neither µ nor Mu work. I could understand the sticking to English letters part but is it possible to be able to call her Mu without the extra y?

I thought it was an anti-bot precaution but I could be wrong. Point in fact, I often am.

I'm not sure how it would help with bots, but it helps a lot with clickability/touchability, and searchability in a lot of really hard to explain but important ways.

In future I'd like to allow at least some non-english characters in character names, as there are plenty of non-english people on the site being forced to mangle their names to add them. It has proved a little challenging to implement, again, primarily for searchability reasons.

I just randomly suspect robot infiltration everywhere I go

Searchability can't be all that bad, we could simply ask people to Google for the key/symbol or provide a table or sorts with the permitted symbols to be copied or clicked on (in an 'advanced search' page, for example).
So no Mu? Guess the y stays.

Bots really are a problem in many cases if there aren't guards against it, but I think you just need one of those images with hard to identify symbols or a really easy question to get rid of them.

It really can. There are performance and lag issues to consider on top of usability issues.