Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hostnames and usernames to reserve

ldpreload.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–25 of 25 posts

Re: Hostnames and usernames to reserve

#21

Post by jonasvp »

Well, that would have been helpful when I announced http://www.browser-details.com on HN - it allows you to reserve a subdomain and it never even occurred to me that I'd have to restrict them (apart from the obvious regex).

So a thoughtful HNer taught me a lesson and reserved "www". Took me a second to figure out why the site didn't behave as expected...

Re: Hostnames and usernames to reserve

#23

Post by gpvos »

ams6110 wrote: post #5
shurcooL wrote: post #2

The article looks great and makes many good points, but I'll pick on one: why disallow upper case letters from usernames?

Email addresses and domain names are case-ignoring so you should never allow usernames that differ only in case. Allowing only lower case is an easy way to do this.

The local part of an email address is not required to be case-insensitive, except for the Postmaster address. RFC 822: "The domain-dependent string is uninterpreted, except by the final sub-domain; the rest of the mail service merely transmits it as a literal string."

However, there are too many services smashing the case of the local part to either lower or upper case that case-sensitive names have become nigh impossible to use.

Re: Hostnames and usernames to reserve

#24

Post by _theskumar »

Faced with similar issues, I maintain a python library called python-usernames[1] with list of closed to 400 reserved words[2].

Publishing this as a library helps a lot collecting the wordlist over time and be able to use the same list in all my projects.

[1] https://github.com/theskumar/python-usernames

[2] https://github.com/theskumar/python-usernames/blob/master/us...

Post reply on HN