h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi

When Gnomon goes Tony we all go Tony

Only now he's reverted

For future readers we all did a Tony Curtis just then . . . oh, forget it, what future readers?

'oh, forget it, what future readers'

Me, for a start I missed the whole thing...

I probably should have done a Tony thing too, but I don't generally mess with my name much.

I'd love to know how Peet is getting away with that name, though!

<./>UserDetails?skin=plain</.> is the hack for special characters. (It also allows more than fifty characters, but don't abuse it.)

TRiG.

Dear Gnomsn.

Have you really changed your name? It is such a super name with a soft "G".

So what name do I put down as my friend? I wonder.

And now I have already forgotten to ask for my reply to be published so shot off and found that it had not bee posted. What name must I put down as a friend? I am sure tht I shall not remember anything else. Did you manage to hear any wonderful concerts, and how did El's French help you all?

Did you all enjoy your trip to Paris? I would love to read about it. I saw something about the Pere Lacahise Cenetery, but by the time I got to that my eyes were really dreary. And thank you for the BST information.

Go well,
Christiane AR80

2/IV/2010 6.48 BST

Christiane, I changed my name to Tonymon three weeks ago, in protest at the Moderators changing my name to "Researcher U151503". But I changed it back again the same day, when the Editors explained to the me the problems they're having and how they didn't have much alternative.

Even if I were to change my name, you wouldn't have to change your friends list, as I am already on it.

'I changed it back again the same day, when the Editors explained to the me the problems they're having and how they didn't have much alternative.'

In all seriousness, Gnomon, it would be nice for you to finish this little episode. It's good to raise issues and look for them to be resolved, but it's only fair to explain the resolutions as well, especially where other people have joined in the 'protest'. It seems like you've made a fairly innocent mistake that I for one would not like to repeat.

There was a lot of discussion of this, Rich, in various places; it's just not all together here in my journal.

In summary, the new sign-in system restricts us to 50 characters in our name and also outlaws almost all punctuation.

The plain skin, because it is not suppported by the BBC, was never changed, so it still allows much longer names and any sort of punctuation.

The h2g2 Eds have no control over the new sign-in system. They encourage us to use the plain skin preferences option to add punctuation to our names if we want, but not to give ourselves names longer than 50 characters, as it can cause problems. Any user with a name longer than 50 characters will have it reset by the moderators if they spot it.

Since it is not possible to create a name greater than 50 characters using supported BBC systems, the warning you get from the moderators, which is a 'canned' response, doesn't explain that this is the reason you've had your name reset, causing great puzzlement in the h2g2 community.

The Eds are working with the BBC developers to put in a permanent solution which will allow h2g2 users to have names longer than 50 characters, and in the meantime, they ask our forbearance and plead with us not to abuse the system - we should police ourselves and keep to 50 characters or less.

Thanks, Gnomon - I do appreciate what you've just written, though I didn't expect you to summarise the whole sitewide issue for the likes of me. I'm aware of most of this - and if I wasn't, I'd try to rtm before asking specific questions

I was just wondering why your original nickname was rejected; counting the characters, I see it's 75 or so, and I guess that's what caused the issue. Sorry if I was a little obtuse - it just wasn't clear from reading your journal why the 'canaries' nickname had been rejected.

Apologies for causing confusion, particularly if you thought I was asking you to explain everything to do with the issue! I was just curious as to why it had affected you in particular.

>>I'd try to rtm before asking specific questions

One of the problems is that the page which explains what is allowed and what is not allowed doesn't say that your name should not exceed 50 characters. And if you do exceed 50 characters, then the message you get back from the mods gives four possible reason why your name might have been rejected, but none of them is the true reason, that the name was too long. So 'reading the manual' wouldn't do you a lot of good. Hence the confusion.

I asked the Eds to change the guidelines on names to mention that they shouldn't be more than 50, but they Eds have no control over that page - it's a BBC-wide page. As far as the BBC are concerned, it is not possible to create a name bigger than 50, so they shouldn't have to tell people not to do it.

Right. That's all really, really poor. I guess the Eds are doing their best in less than perfect circumstances.

I see that the Plain skin has now been modified, so that it is no longer possible to set your Nickname using it. This means that long names and names with punctuation are now unavailable, until the promised new feature comes into force.

Yes, I was trying to remove the edited entry info from my name (since the voting thread has been closed) but I can't access my nickname *sighs*

I should probably have timestamped that last posting, giving the important nature of its contents.

Right. It's just after half past midday, 13-Apr-2010. So the last posting was a few minutes before that.

You can still change your nickname by the 'legal' method.

Not in 'My Preferences' any more. That page refers to 'Settings' which takes me to a BBCiD page, where my name is simply 'Titania'. I can't find my current h2g2 nickname anywhere.

The "Name" field on the Settings page doesn't show your current h2g2 nickname, but it does set it. If you put a new nickname into the "Name" field and press update, then your nickname will change.

But if I go into the BBC settings I have a completely different name? So how can I change it there?

It still allows you to change your nickname

It won't be completely different there if you change it