Allow special characters in dragon names

[PrincessLucy]

I would love question marks, periods and commas, if nothing else. That would make naming more fun.

 

[StarlightLion]

Big support, for as much as it's possible. I don't know enough about coding or anything like that to give coherent thoughts on the matter, and there well might be logistical reasons why we can't use certain characters - in which case, I'm not upset about the restrictions.

That all said, I've love to be able to use special characters. I name some of my dragons in my personal language, and it uses á é í ó ú for some words. It's honestly a minor gripe all things considered, "Lumen Ina" is effectively the same name as "Lumen Ína", but I'd still be delighted to be able to use the fully correct version.

 

Also punctuation that is allowed would be awesome to use at the start and end of names ^-^

Edited October 4, 2022 by StarlightLion

[Aie]

Support! In my first language, the difference between a & ä or o & ö might completely change the meaning of the word, so I can't simply replace them when naming my dragons, and that's been a source of frustration for years. And I know I'm not the only one with the same problem.

 

Some people have expressed worry about the strain of adding support for thousands of different characters, but I feel like extending the already available Latin alphabet would be more likely and sensible as a solution than including multiple completely different scripts. (Having the letters in the second Unicode block available would already satisfy me, but to cover more languages and players, Latin Extended-A might be cool, to mention just one example.)

 

"But the flavour text is in English! I don't like seeing foreign names on an English-language website!" Too bad. People are already naming their dragons in different languages, including completely made-up ones. You can still use English only, if that's what you want. Not everyone's choices are aesthetically pleasing to you, and you cannot expect them to be. Personally, I'm not a fan of the trend of adding tags like 'CB' or Arabic numerals to a dragon's name, but my solution is simply not naming my own dragons like that, instead of wanting to make other people play the game in a way that caters to my preferences, just like I'm allowed to collect and create the kinds of lineages I like while others are still free to breed theirs.

 

(Plus I agree that more punctuation would be useful for those of us making lyrical lineages, and I'd definitely take advantage of that.)

[Skadi]

Full support for a myriad of reasons the thread mentions. 

[sorenna]

Please!  Commas in names would be so, so useful.

 

(Question marks and exclamation points would be, too, but I know they're sometimes part of URLs, so they might not be feasible.)

[Fuzzbucket]

Accents and umlauts would greatly improve name creation...

[0x08]

Enthusiastic support! The addition of the Latin-1 Supplement block in particular (minus the control and whitespace characters) would be great, since that is where a lot of non-English alphabet letters appear.

Edited October 5, 2022 by 0x08

[Erra]

Personally: characters like "?" or "." at the end will be nice, but other than most basic special characters will be a like disaster for me. But its just personall thing.So i support only part about ? ! . at the end of name. But still i will be more happy if character limit will be incrased a little for both: dragon name & group name (eg for now its impossible to have group with dragon breed name and type "Two-Headed: False-Headed Hydra Dragon" )

[Fuzzbucket]

Two Headed Hydras would surely be enough for a group name ? It's clear and unambiguous.

[TCA]

It's an absolute disgrace that I can't name a dragon 👁👄👁, and I think this should be corrected posthaste.

[Moriaty]

I like the idea but dunno how this is going to work with the code, because names are used as part of the link like https://dragcave.net/view/n/Fettuccine Pazta

 

emoji definitely won't work for url lol things like ~, !, $, &, ', (, ), *, +, ,, ;, =, :, ? , @ are still debatable...emoji...emm

 

(I just attempted to go to /n/👁 and the url just automatically devoured the emoji lol definitely not recognizable at least by whatever dc is using)

 

Btw not allowing spaces at start or end of name is because the url automatically truncates the spaces at start or end - you can try it yourself. Why are apostrophes and dashes not allowed at beginning and end I'm not sure though, agree it is a bit annoying

 

However there was one thing I was wondering about - underscores. They're permissible in user names so they should be readily usable in urls, since the /user/ link works fine, but they are not allowed in dragon names? why???

[ACDragonMaster]

Technically speaking, it's possible to put all kinds of "special characters" (read: non-standard English) in a url.  Chinese and Japanese websites routinely have pages with Chinese characters in the urls, especially shopping pages.  For example, if I go on Yahoo Auctions Japan and do a search for the Suikoden games in Japanese (幻想水滸伝) the url clearly shows that search string:

 

Now, depending on a combination of factors, sometimes urls will substitute the unicode codes instead.  For example, the classic %20 for a space.   But it's absolutely 100% doable to have all kinds of non-English characters be part of a url potentially.

 

[Fuzzbucket]

Not quite. To see those, you'd need to have the correct font installed - and most of us don't have Chinese or Japanese, and quite a few don't have Russian or Greek either.

[KageSora]

34 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

Not quite. To see those, you'd need to have the correct font installed - and most of us don't have Chinese or Japanese, and quite a few don't have Russian or Greek either.

 

that's very weird to me because my browser (firefox) displays those perfectly fine by default.  Same when I use Chrome.  I never installed any special extra stuff to display those characters.  Both on mobile and on desktop I've never had trouble displaying those.

[Fuzzbucket]

Times may have changed then. It certainly still holds for documents.

[KageSora]

29 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

Times may have changed then. It certainly still holds for documents.

 

Ah, yeah, it definitely does for things like documents and file names, much to my eternal frustration

 

 

Overall, I don't see any reason why this would be a bad suggestion since it's able to be implemented on a technical level these days (at least from a URL perspective), I don't see much reason else to not implement at least a little wider variety of characters in the names.

Edited October 25, 2022 by KageSora
hit post too soon

[Fuzzbucket]

I'm all for special characters; I have to say I'm not thrilled by the idea of Japanese or Chiness (or indeed Cyrillic or Greek) in names, but I would say that, being a standard alphabet user !  

[KageSora]

Guarantee it'll lead to the "total gibberish because people are using symbols from other writing systems for their aesthetic appearance rather than how they're pronounced" phenomenon at least some of the time, though, so people should be braced to see that lol.

[Fuzzbucket]

That's EXACTLY my problem with it !

[Rosedamai]

55 minutes ago, KageSora said:

Guarantee it'll lead to the "total gibberish because people are using symbols from other writing systems for their aesthetic appearance rather than how they're pronounced" phenomenon at least some of the time, though, so people should be braced to see that lol.

As a person whose first language isn't English, yes, that would also irritate me greatly. Feels like people are using my language as a prop lol 

[Aie]

1 hour ago, KageSora said:

Guarantee it'll lead to the "total gibberish because people are using symbols from other writing systems for their aesthetic appearance rather than how they're pronounced" phenomenon at least some of the time, though, so people should be braced to see that lol.

(Not specifically replying to you but the general discussion sparked by this:) I do understand the irritation and can relate to it to an extent, but I'd still rather be able to name dragons in my language and have others (seemingly) misuse some of its features than not be able to use them at all myself. After all, a lot of the naming choices people currently make do not aesthetically please me, but that's their business and not mine: what you can do is collect the kinds of lineages and use the kinds of names that you prefer while letting others play how they like. I don't think "Nämeš Líkē Ţhis" would be fundamentally that different from how people already add certain tags like "Dragon Name L28fg-CB F" or use "U-w-U Dragon Name U-w-U" to work around the unique name requirement. A thing might look silly to some but make others happy at the same time. (These examples are made-up and I mean no offense to anyone; what I'm trying to get at is that people already have different naming styles and that shouldn't be an argument against the inclusion of extended Latin characters.)

Edited October 25, 2022 by Aie

[Skadi]

It's also very easy to avoid seeing names that are very silly, since interactions with players aren't super required to enjoy this game. If you don't want to trade with users who name their dragons gibberish in chinese/korean/japanese just for the "aesthetics", you're welcome to decline those trades. You can re-abandon eggs that have poorly named parents if you pick them up in the AP. It would be a very low-impact decision that would then make it possible for people who speak the language to name their dragons proper names in that language.

Edited October 25, 2022 by Skadi

[Fuzzbucket]

I absolutely do understand wanting to use your own language - but I can see this kind of thing springing up: I REALLY wouldn't want to see names like that... which could well show up in various places way back on a lineage that I would otherwise really want.

 

F簦幻üéå想Ъ৳

Edited October 25, 2022 by Fuzzbucket

[KageSora]

I'd be concerned about how that works with a screen reader, I've seen on other sites how some screen reader users hate 'em and there's players who use screen readers for this game as well.

 

(That is, they have issues with the mismatched random character misuse, not when things are being used normally)

Edited October 25, 2022 by KageSora

[ACDragonMaster]

The question seems to be, does it matter what other users think of a given user's name choices, or just that user?  A lot of the back and forth boils down to "I want the option to properly name my dragon using special characters" vs "it'd be annoying to see people misusing special characters" at its core.

 

So really the question is, is the possibility of maybe running across dragon names you dislike aesthetically (which is already an issue in some ways) outweigh the ability of users to actually use foreign-language names properly?

 

that said if foreign character support gets added I have a whole clan of dragons that might need to be remained, lol