[MUD-Dev] Unicode, ascii and names

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

The recent naming discussion has reminded me of a problem which I had
forgotten. The problem is that I want players to choose names in their
own language, however there must be an intuitive set of
ascii-translations for obvious reasons.

Example:

I want the norwegian/danish letters '=E6=F8=E5' to be equivalent with the
following sequences:

 "=E6" =3D>  "ae","a","e"
 "=F8" =3D>  "oe","o"
 "=E5" =3D>  "aa","a"

So if a player creates a character with the name "F=E5n=E6" then the
following names should be equivalent: faanae, faana, faane, fanae, fana,
fane...

I think I can handle this, although not efficiently. But what about the
other Unicode characters? Any ideas? Any problems?

It would also be nice to reserve visually similar names, in order to
prevent harassment. For instance the name "Voulva" should lead to a
banning of a name like "Vuolva", "kijt" should ban "kjit", "kiit"...

And finally, when a user tries to create a name that is taken then it
would be nice if the system could suggest several phonetically similar
names, but they should be visually different.=20
Except, if somebody wants a name like "fuck" then I guess one could skip
providing the phonetically similar names...

Help!
--
Ola Fosheim Groestad,Norway      http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~olag/



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