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missy_

Allow special characters in dragon names

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There was a previous topic from 2013, locked with no explanation.


Suggestion: Allow dragons to have special character names.

 

Reasons, in no particular order:

 

1. This would greatly improve the number of available dragon names, and people would not have to ask for use of the same name as someone else, if they had options to use special characters.

2. People can argue that "dragons don't use special characters in their names" yet we name dragons "ooo Dragon Name ooo" as if that makes any more sense than using a special character.

3. It makes contacting people on a forum difficult if the forum member uses a character in their forum name that cannot be used in a dragon name, such as an underscore.***

4. It would make song lyrics easier

5. At the very least, allow hyphens and underscores at the beginning or end of a dragon's name.

6. Special characters, such as , _ / ?  (comma, underscore, hyphen at beginning or end of name, underscore at beginning or end of name, question marks, slashes as some examples)

7. Why not allow it?

 



***In my own special case, I am motivated by the following:


My forum name, unfortunately, has an underscore in it (the one without the underscore is taken, or I would have taken it) and when I name a dragon "Contact missy on the forum" it necessitates a second dragon with "missy with an underscore" ... the likelihood of anyone putting that together and realizing what I am saying, along with having to create a separate highlighted group, is untenable.

 

Regardless of my personal situation, it seems that dragons could have special characters in them.

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, missy_ said:

2. People can argue that "dragons don't use special characters in their names" yet we name dragons "ooo Dragon Name ooo" as if that makes any more sense than using a special character.

 

idk if people are actually using this argument, but it seems silly when clearly the scroll holder is the one who names the dragons, not the... dragons themselves, haha.

 

totally agree with allowing special symbols. if we can use numbers (which are not allowed on [most] real-world birth certificates), then why not other conventional symbols? if you can put it in a password, why not in an arbitrary dragon name? i've long dreamed of being able to name a dragon something akin to 'green worm!' so maybe this'll take me one step closer.

 

edit: also please add in periods, too! and colons, semicolons, if commas are on the list.

Edited by steeve

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I wonder if there's a technical reason for this, such as with links including the dragons' names. My username unfortunately has a period, and it used to give me a lot of issues with linking.

 

Also, right now if an outright inappropriate word is used in a name, the system detects it and doesn't allow it even if the name isn't taken. But when you include special characters it would make it much more difficult to prevent loopholes.

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I would love to have just one or two more character spaces for names. It's sooo frustrating when you're soooo close to naming the dragon what you want to, but it doesn't fit by one letter.

 

9 hours ago, missy_ said:

It would make song lyrics easier

How so? 

 

9 hours ago, missy_ said:

Special characters, such as , _ / ?  (comma, underscore, hyphen at beginning or end of name, underscore at beginning or end of name, question marks, slashes as some examples)

It would be nice to have. I've got dragons that their names are questions.

 

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Honestly, I'd love it if we could just use the 'special characters' already allowed at the beginning/end of the name! It frustrates me to no end that it *says*  'can contain letters, numbers, spaces, apostrophes, and dashes (although punctuation at the beginning and end may be trimmed off)' , but actually you outright *can't* use those things at the beginning or end, it won't let you name. 

 

I'd love to be able to use question marks (a few of my dragon's names read strange because they are supposed to be questions but that's not obvious...) any maybe even colons. 

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9 hours ago, MissK. said:

I wonder if there's a technical reason for this, such as with links including the dragons' names

That's probably part of it. Take the /n name link (https://dragcave.net/view/n/*dragon name*)

 

It might cause problems if the dragon is named /Cola - because now the link becomes: *blah blah*/n//Cola (and there's a few other symbols that mess with URLs if memory serves)

 

That aside, I'm on the fence about it. On the one hand - more variety and ways for people to have common names (*bob* - /bob\ - etc) AND more creativity - but on the same token, after awhile you end up with the current issue with names.

 

Still, it would be nice if I could name a dragon with the same name as a creature I have on several other sites [it's the biggest mark that I am me aside from the username]

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I remember a discussion on this topic, and one reason special characters aren’t allowed is because they eat up the character limit, or something similar to this, I believe.

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20 hours ago, Sextonator said:

I remember a discussion on this topic, and one reason special characters aren’t allowed is because they eat up the character limit, or something similar to this, I believe.

That's true for some, like zalgo text, but punctuation and such is no such case.

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Thinking about the cute emoticons I could name my dragons if special characters were allowed, lol. I'd love this, assuming it's feasible on a technical level.

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Yeah. Like, I've wanted to have non-english letters in my dragon names, but the special characters just had the accents removed.

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At the very least I'd like it if the currently permitted punctuation was allowed to be at the end of a name.

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On 4/5/2021 at 11:02 AM, Long_Before_Sunrise said:

I would love to have just one or two more character spaces for names. It's sooo frustrating when you're soooo close to naming the dragon what you want to, but it doesn't fit by one letter.

 

How so? 

 

It would be nice to have. I've got dragons that their names are questions.

 

To answer the "how so?" with regards to lyrical lineages... very often song lyrics and poems include commas and other punctuation marks, which can't currently be used when we're naming dragons. That gives us the choice when naming to either not use any sort of "pause here" indicator, or else to use up three characters instead of two: xxx - xxx as opposed to xxx, xxx in order to make the name read a little closer to the lyric in question.

 

Here's a CB from my lyrical lineage of Pink Floyd's song Breathe: https://dragcave.net/lineage/utkmH

I chose to name him "Breathe - breathe in the air"

The actual song lyrics are "Breathe, breathe in the air"

My other option was "Breathe breathe in the air"

 

Because commas can't be used, I had to choose between adding an extra character (space) or not approximating the punctuation at all. In this case, the name was short enough that the extra space wasn't an issue, but it has been with longer names, especially when you're trying to fit the lyrics into a set number of lines for an even-gen lineage or whatever.

 

14 minutes ago, Illusn said:

Yeah. Like, I've wanted to have non-english letters in my dragon names, but the special characters just had the accents removed.

This as well.

 

"Isäni ääni" is a favorite song of mine, one that I'd love to do a lineage for... but you can see from the title alone where that won't work unless I Anglicize the spelling all over the place. I won't do that, because I'm trying to actually learn the language (Finnish) and I'm having enough trouble remembering where the accents do and don't go without purposefully misspelling a ton of words. No need to confuse myself any more than I've already done!

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I would love punctuation.  ?!,. would be enough to make me happy.

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+1 support for this. I would love to have at least commas and periods in names. Like I have dragons that are named things like "Mr Blah Blah" or whatever and it bugs the heck out of me that there's no period. x__x

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1 hour ago, OMGitsKairi said:

+1 support for this. I would love to have at least commas and periods in names. Like I have dragons that are named things like "Mr Blah Blah" or whatever and it bugs the heck out of me that there's no period. x__x

 

100% Agreed!   Abbreviations used in names should have periods. Period!

 

But then too, even a few extra characters would expand the naming possibilities for the many creative people here. 

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I would use periods, commas, question marks and exclamation points if they were available.

 

Support!

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On 4/5/2021 at 6:57 PM, ShorahNagi said:

That's probably part of it. Take the /n name link (https://dragcave.net/view/n/*dragon name*)

 

It might cause problems if the dragon is named /Cola - because now the link becomes: *blah blah*/n//Cola (and there's a few other symbols that mess with URLs if memory serves)

 

That aside, I'm on the fence about it. On the one hand - more variety and ways for people to have common names (*bob* - /bob\ - etc) AND more creativity - but on the same token, after awhile you end up with the current issue with names.

 

Still, it would be nice if I could name a dragon with the same name as a creature I have on several other sites [it's the biggest mark that I am me aside from the username]

 

oh. this is spot on and probably the whole reason we can't use certain characters in names. it makes absolute sense, thanks for pointing it out. if the name url doesn't change, then it seems like there'll be little chance of extra characters being added to names, since you can't really change which characters urls allow.

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6 hours ago, Guillotine said:

At the very least I'd like it if the currently permitted punctuation was allowed to be at the end of a name.

 

Yes. Yes please. Please? I feel like there are probably reasons some types of characters aren't allowed (like the url issue), but it's especially frustrating that some characters *are* allowed and yet *not* at the beginning or end. I'm currently working on a poem-lineage and I've had to tweak it because I can't use certain punctuation, but then I have to tweak it even more because the punctuation we supposedly can use can't be used at the end of the phrase... 

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Well, I suspect that even if special characters were allowed, an exception could be made for / in a name, since that one's a control character in DC URLs.

Other special characters usually can be url-encoded (e.g. a space becomes %20)

 

The thing is, if you start allowing national characters like ÄÖÜ etc (as much as I would like Umlauts myself), you start going into the unicode range, where you can have several thousand of characters you'll never be able to memorize or even type out on a regular keyboard. And how do you distinguish a bunch of dragons named with Katakana, for example, if you're not familiar with those? Or those squiggly Arabian ... squiggles? You'd need to check codes again for inbreeding.

Or emojis: 😗😙😚

"So that guy has a kissy face with closed eyes and eyebrows in it. Was it the one with the blush or without?"

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4 hours ago, Ruby Eyes said:

And how do you distinguish a bunch of dragons named with Katakana, for example, if you're not familiar with those? Or those squiggly Arabian ... squiggles?

since dragon cave is supposed to be english-centralized (i tried to find where i swear this was written, but i could not for the life of me find it.) for the most part*, i don't see either of these being implemented. they would hardly count as "special characters" to me, imho. 

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2 minutes ago, InvaderAlexis said:

since dragon cave is supposed to be english-centralized (i tried to find where i swear this was written, but i could not for the life of me find it.) for the most part*, i don't see either of these being implemented. they would hardly count as "special characters" to me, imho. 

https://dragcave.net/help/descriptions

As far as I know, that's the only place where that is even mentioned.

Luckily, names are *not* restricted to English Only, otherwise we'd have run out of names a decade ago or so.

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Just now, Ruby Eyes said:

https://dragcave.net/help/descriptions

As far as I know, that's the only place where that is even mentioned.

Luckily, names are *not* restricted to English Only, otherwise we'd have run out of names a decade ago or so.

ah! the one place i didnt look :rolleyes:

thats why i put an asterisk on my sentence... but forgot to finish my thought. my bad, still waking up XD 

my point in saying that though was more so in regards to keeping things more.. universal? blegh, again, should have probably waited until i was more awake to post this, but here we are. i don't think characters from other languages with vastly different writing systems entirely would ever really be added, so i don't think what you said would be a problem.

 

i do think adding question marks/exclamation points/PERIODS(!!!)/underscores/what have you would be immensely helpful though, save if there were coding issues. that was my original thought as well, but since i dont entirely know whether it would be an issue or not, then... 🤷‍♂️

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Support if this is even possible. I'd like to add punctuation to my dragon names.

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I'd like this a lot! at the very least we should be allowed periods, commas and quotation marks since those are common in names/titles

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I'd love to see this, it can make joke lineages easier with the question mark along with lyrical lineages 

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