Hello guys,
So, Scratch only allows you to create usernames using languages like english, etc. But there is a problem creating usernames with other languages. You cannot create usernames from languages with special characters like ß, ç, á, ñ, etc. You also can't create usernames using Chinese characters, Japanese characters, or Korean characters. That can be a huge problem for non-english speaking scratch users. Cyrillic usernames will also have problems. So I suggest scratch adds the support for usernames with special characters from other languages, support for cyrillic, support for Chinese characters, Japanese characters, and Korean characters.

Sort of like the update with the red video app when they added multi-language handles. We could get some creative usernames. I understand that people want multi-language support. And I 100% support this.

Noting that usernames appear in URLs (i.e. the link to a profile page), are there any problems with non-English characters appearing in URLs?

I'd also like to bring up the possible moderation issues that could come from this. Most Scratch Team members do not speak other languages, so I would expect there to be issues of inappropriate non-English usernames being created from this.

Za-Chary wrote:

(#3)
Noting that usernames appear in URLs (i.e. the link to a profile page), are there any problems with non-English characters appearing in URLs?

I'd also like to bring up the possible moderation issues that could come from this. Most Scratch Team members do not speak other languages, so I would expect there to be issues of inappropriate non-English usernames being created from this.

Do you have this same concern about comments? It's virtually the same thing. Comments don't disallow other languages symbols in them.

Za-Chary wrote:

Noting that usernames appear in URLs (i.e. the link to a profile page), are there any problems with non-English characters appearing in URLs?

They can be encoded: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding

Most browsers will automatically decode them when displaying the URL in the address bar.

Za-Chary wrote:

I'd also like to bring up the possible moderation issues that could come from this. Most Scratch Team members do not speak other languages, so I would expect there to be issues of inappropriate non-English usernames being created from this.

The Scratch Team could use a translator.
And there should be a filter for other languages

I speak chinese, as a Chinese American, so i can translate. I read Simplified and Traditional, and speak the Mandarin and Cantonese dialects of Chinese.

There also should be other latin characters that can be used in usernames, like á, ñ, ç, ø, ö, ü, etc. People from other countries, are forced to use english usernames, and some may not know english. They can only use their language if their language does not include these accented characters and is latin based, like indonesian, malay, fillipino, dutch, etc.

Scratch could maybe add people of other nationalities to their team, so moderation is easier with foreign languages. Maybe people that speak Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, etc.

Procidic wrote:

Scratch could maybe add people of other nationalities to their team, so moderation is easier with foreign languages. Maybe people that speak Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, etc.

The Scratchers need to apply for the Scratch Team though.

Most users are from the United States (and probably have US keyboards), so it wouldn't make sense to allow usermames to have characters that a lot of people probably won't know how to type. Especially given the fact that non-English characters will probably become extremely popular since a lot of American users that use online “fancy” text generators will, for instance, use a Russian character as a backwards “R”.

Additionally, people could use characters that look like Latin letters to impersonate or to bypass the filter.

I could see this working for accents, but only if, the accents were ignored the way that capital letters currently are. For instance, if @MythosLöre was taken then you would be unable to create @MythosLore, and all links to @MythosLore would redirect you to @MythosLöre.