Why is the capitalization on my username inconsistent?

December 14, 2007 10:09 AM

Capitalization issue: why is my username capitalized differently in different places on Metafilter?

Metafilter, AskMe, and MeTa credit me me this way: "posted by Pastabagel at 10:57 AM on December 14". But when I write, I'm "Posting as: pastabagel".

In addition, I'm very cordially addressed upon my return to the site with "welcome back pastabagel" in the upper right corner (though grammatically I suppose it should be "welcome back, pastabagel" - but you didn't hear that from me). Has anyone else experienced this?

I suspect that I registered with the capital P, but I don't remember. When I log in I do so using only lower case letters. This is obviously a minor glitch, so you can of course tell me what I can do with my capital 'P' and I won't be offended. Thanks.

posted by Pastabagel to bugs at 10:09 AM (33 comments total)

See here. The login process is case-insensitive, and the site retains the cased-ness of your login and displays it in some of the places you've noticed.
posted by cortex at 10:13 AM on December 14, 2007

If you sign out and then sign back in with the new, secure system your name should be capitalized everywhere.
posted by pb at 10:13 AM on December 14, 2007

(I've been meaning to ask Matt about an Early Days of Mefi issue related to this, actually. These days, usernames are definitely not case-sensitive for the purposes of reserving a name—so you can't go and sign up as Cortex or CORTEX or any other variant, because I've already got the case-insensitive string "cortex" staked out, which makes good sense.

But that can't have always been the case, viz. judith vs. Judith.)
posted by cortex at 10:17 AM on December 14, 2007

I did as pb suggested and everything is fine. I can't believe I've been logged in all this time. I think Firefox and I have to have a little conversation about privacy after it has a reinstallation time-out.

Thanks guys.
posted by Pastabagel at 10:20 AM on December 14, 2007

This post is not up to pastabagel's usual high standards. I have come to expect much more.
posted by popechunk at 10:25 AM on December 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Lowercase p's are actually really insecure—we're phasing them out across the site.
posted by pb at 10:28 AM on December 14, 2007

Lowercase p's are actually really insecure

Lowercase q's on the other hand, are just the opposite.
posted by quin at 10:37 AM on December 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Hey, I asked this before. Except that time everyone said I was crazy!
posted by smackfu at 10:44 AM on December 14, 2007

this explains why my username keeps popping up as schmegegge for other people's computers.
posted by shmegegge at 10:45 AM on December 14, 2007

I get Kattallus and Katulus and all kinds of misspellings. I think we should start a club, shmegeggleguck.
posted by Kattullus at 10:49 AM on December 14, 2007

My name appears all over the place, especially on AskMe questions that I did not post.
posted by [more inside] at 11:07 AM on December 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

I feel pale.
posted by chlorus at 11:30 AM on December 14, 2007

I think the line is "pretty".
posted by cortex at 11:34 AM on December 14, 2007

finally someone spells my name correctly!
posted by shmegegge at 11:36 AM on December 14, 2007

posted by [more inside]

Best. Sock-puppet account name. Evar.
posted by sdodd at 11:40 AM on December 14, 2007

I feel pretty pale.
posted by chlorus at 1:24 PM on December 14, 2007

This post is not up to pastabagel's usual high standards. I have come to expect much more.
deja vu - the tyranny of high expectations
posted by exogenous at 1:50 PM on December 14, 2007

Why are so many user-names unCapitalized? If your name is "John" in real life, why use "john" on the internet? It doesn't make any sense! explain! Abuse of Proper Nouns!
posted by Rumple at 2:09 PM on December 14, 2007

lazy fingers.
posted by shmegegge at 2:10 PM on December 14, 2007

Thanks Schwamagog -- I knew it was a digital thing.
posted by Rumple at 2:24 PM on December 14, 2007

If your name is "John" in real life, why use "john" on the internet?

John is a name. john is a username. It is a mystery.
posted by smackfu at 4:05 PM on December 14, 2007

You're crazy!
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:33 PM on December 14, 2007

Oh My Gawd this is awesome! I can be CroutonSupafreak and I never knew it. .... except I don't know if i can bear to log out.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 5:03 PM on December 14, 2007

Please do. :)
posted by danb at 7:49 PM on December 14, 2007

But you can't be CroutonsUpaFreak to everyone else, right? It sounds like the capitalization will be user-facing, not public-facing.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:47 PM on December 14, 2007

Also, I think unix used to (and still does?) enforce lowercase usernames.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:49 PM on December 14, 2007

Yeah, I'm confused... I get that if I log in as 'Ranglin', then *I* get to see the uppercase R...

But, how about the capitalisation with everyone else? How did Pastabagel get an uppercase P? Is the original nick registration case-sensitive, but the login/cookie case-insensitive? Is 'cortex' now forever doomed to be lowercase to others, even if he is cOrTeX to himself?
posted by ranglin at 2:57 AM on December 15, 2007

Lowercase p's are actually really insecure—we're phasing them out across the site.
posted by pb at 6:28 PM on December 14 [+] [!]

Well, that's just plum bum. Elementally.
posted by Sparx at 4:06 AM on December 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Is 'cortex' now forever doomed to be lowercase to others, even if he is cOrTeX to himself?

Yep. It's my burden to bear. Account creation tracks case and sets it in stone, but blocks out the whole string as case-insensitive to prevent imposters.
posted by cortex at 9:19 AM on December 15, 2007

Also, I think unix used to (and still does?) enforce lowercase usernames.

Philo, we're not all Unix users on some machine in the #1's basement -- we are a bunch of "users" in a database sitting on a server (that I think is actually running Windows, right? I remember when Matt announced some new Windows app that ran on his server and monitored for JRun downtime. Yeah)
posted by misterbrandt at 7:16 AM on December 18, 2007

I think philo's arguing more the tendency toward, not enforcement of, lowercase usernames. That for a long time usernames on a lot of systems were necessarily short, non-fancy, and case-insensitive probably had a lot of influence on the existing aesthetic of the username.

I can remember, hazily, a number of different occasions where mefites have explained/bemoaned their nick as the product of overly restrictive assumptions about what they'd be allowed to use. I can't remember where I put it, right now, but I did some analysis a while back on mefi usernames and a lot of them are short, unpunctuated, lower-case strings; and if I'm remembering right, the proportion of usernames that don't fit that old-school profile has grown over time.
posted by cortex at 7:56 AM on December 18, 2007

Lower-case was an aesthetic choice for me, but I was a shocked when I was allowed to use a space in my username. I still feel a little uncomfortable about it. Spaces in file names are still pretty taboo in unix-land. Spaces in a username? Unthinkable.
posted by team lowkey at 12:24 PM on December 18, 2007

Yes, thank you cortex, that's what I was getting at.
posted by philomathoholic at 1:43 PM on December 18, 2007