Though per RFC 5321, only the local part needs to have Case Preserved – everything after the “@” is explicitly not case sensitive (hopefully the BoingBoing parser splits up the addresses and respects this, since it would otherwise cause unnecessary search misses).
The standard also says that they don’t recommend paying attention to case (as it “impedes interoperability”); they only recommend you preserve it. EG: you are absolutely within your rights, nay, encouraged to run your system such that it doesn’t respect case for matching on any part of an email address, and you only be careful to preserve case for when you send out data to another system that may have been written by people who enjoy going counter to RFC recommendations.
My reading is that BoingBoing would be totally within it’s rights to block people from creating “Smith@domain.com” and “smith@domain.com” as separate accounts – I was trying to figure out how many email servers on the internet might actually be “broken” in this manner, and could not come up with a good approach.
I suppose BoingBoing casts a wide enough net that it’ll affect some users, and some of them must exist in the data set… and who wants to argue with someone who’s happy running on server with weird niggles like that (that’s the sort of thing that self selects for users with a talent for “time suck”, I bet).
“The local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive.
Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case
of mailbox local-parts. In particular, for some hosts, the user
“smith” is different from the user “Smith”. However, exploiting the
case sensitivity of mailbox local-parts impedes interoperability and
is discouraged. Mailbox domains follow normal DNS rules and are
hence not case sensitive.”
I guess this comment isn’t too important, but it’s still counts as new comment system test load, which is why I’m really here anyway. So far so good!
There seems to be an account reserved under Josh_Jasper that’s probably me, but I wasn’t able to get at it. Can someone just direct me to it? I assume it has things like “trust level” and so on that aren’t brand spanking new. I’ve been on BB for years.
I tried to create an account under my old display name, Gulliver, using the email I registered with years ago, but was told that user name was taken. My old log-in name was magnetarian. I can’t remember if I ever tied my Disqus account to my BoingBoing account (I think I did), but I do know my BoingBoing account was the older of the two.
Possibly I sabotaged myself by not using the same name for my log-in and display names. As a frequent poster, I had over a thousand comments under the old system, and I’m slightly concerned about someone impersonating me. On the chance that Gulliver is simply reserved, how do I create that account?
Thanks in advance for any help and apologies for waiting over a month to re-register.
Unfortunately, Gulliver was already registered even before Boing Boing started talking to us about using Discourse. Even though Gulliver isn’t on BBS, we use a central username registry. There were about 150 Boing Boing usernames that couldn’t be registered for the same reason, usually because they were very common usernames like Jack, Joe, and… Gulliver.
Understood. I guess 19th century literary protagonists are more popular than I realized
Thanks for explaining. I’ve elected to change it to a different story’s protagonist. When I created the account, I received an email asking me if I wanted to reserve my username globally across Discourse. I held off until I found out more. Now that I’ve decided on a new name, is there some way I can reserve GulliverFoyle instead? I went to the Discourse.org site and tried to log-in with my new BB account, but no dice. I didn’t want to re-create the account in case I screwed something up.
Hi, Neil, I haven’t been able to “reclaim” my old username (just “daemonsquire”, without the “1” afterward), and I’m not sure if someone else on BBS has already claimed it somehow, or if I’m somehow just not hitting on the right combination of password/username/email account. My earlier account at least has the same avatar as I stuck on this one, if that helps determine that it’s me… I haven’t been able to find the right forum in which to bring this up, before now–am I there yet?
