10 ms·

Username cannot contain 'clyde'

228 points by ajsfoux234 4y ago

_carbyau_ 4y ago
Why don't bots have some other distinction? Like a blue tick or <blink> or some screenreader function? Why do their messages have to appear the same as humans? If bots should all operate in a distinctive space, give it that space. Mind you architectural foresight is hard so maybe they'll get there.
- leduyquang753 4y ago
  They do have the tick next to their names and yet they still have this nonsense in place anyway.
  - themoonisachees 4y ago
    Because they don't trust the average discord user to not fall for someone who doesn't have a checkmark or system tag. And frankly they're right.
  - AlfeG 4y ago
    Because it's not working. Put a big red flag that this is a scammer, and still there will be people falling into scam
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
This just reminds me of the birthday cake for Clint. Poor Clint. "Name on cake must not be Clint"
teddyh 4y ago
Change your name to “Sue” instead: https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-they-did-to-that-fourth-pacman-ghost/ https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-the...
smitop 4y ago
This happens because Discord has a system bot also named Clyde that mostly tells users when their messages fail to send (among other system messages).
- midasuni 4y ago
  Why not call it DiscordBot?
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Coz someone tried to be cute instead of smart
NelsonMinar 4y ago
"Clyde is the name used for a fake bot in the client. It responds to specific Built-In slash commands (/timeout, /ban, /kick and /nick), and sends private messages with information or errors". https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Clyde https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Clyde
fire 4y ago
The key point here that was hard to find is that they and others had a username containing Clyde set already, and now can't update anything else about their profile because their username has come to be considered invalid. That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users Thanks for the clarification, but imagining it's pretty easy that this could just be a bug, e.g. they knew they wanted to prevent future usernames from having "clyde", and maybe even realized some existing clydes would be grandfathered in, but didn't realize it would prevent existing clydes from updating anything else on their profile.
  - fire 4y ago
    yeah, it would be pretty simple to skip validation of the username if it didn't change
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  Sounds like they're doing a PUT when they should be doing a PATCH.
- plusminusplus 4y ago
  If you use a + sign in your email, some services accept it at sign up but not later on, when users try to update it.
  - fire 4y ago
    yeah, I've had this happen a number of times because the service was treating the `+` as a space in either the signup or the update, and I've had some success forcing it by replacing `+` with `%2B`
userbinator 4y ago
This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names (and perhaps distinguished through other means too); if the error was instead "Username cannot contain 'discord'", it'd be more obvious.
- jameshart 4y ago
  This of course rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as a 'regular name'. I'm obliged to link you to 'falsehoods programmers believe about names' now. I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
  - userbinator 4y ago
    There are certainly far more Clydes than there are Discords (has anyone even been legally named Discord before?) I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules. ..."then change them", as someone might say. But that article seems to be mostly about the edge-cases. I don't think someone named Clyde is an edge-case, nor would someone named Bonnie, for that matter.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      So I perhaps should have been more clear. If your plan in choosing a name for your bot is to choose one that won't collide with a human, you are going to run into the fact that humans have a lot of very different names. Hence the link to the 'falsehoods' piece. The US Census of 1950, for example, has a lot of Descords, Descards, Dicords, Dioscords, and... in PA, a Rosa B Discord, in NYC, a Mr Discord. In general, all I'm saying is, it is far better if your intention is to allow people to choose their name, to not put any arbitrary restriction in place with the justification that 'it probably won't affect anyone'. If there's one thing people really care about it's their name. And no matter how unlikely you think it is that someone will run into your restriction... you're almost certainly wrong.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Why is an internal system in the same namespace as users? I wonder whether there are constraints that made it difficult to implement this functionality in another way, or this is just a bad design decision.
- taberiand 4y ago
  It's probably a mix of both. Namespacing often seems to be an afterthought in many systems, and it can be hard to refactor in once an architecture has solidified. It's not always the wrong choice to mingle identifiers of different types, but I think often people err on the side of convenience (/ laziness) instead of thinking through all of the potential issues.
  - askiiart 4y ago
    I think it could also be for the purpose of preventing imposters, as what Clyde says is what Discord says.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    The discord username namespace is weird. You get to set a display name which doesn't have to be unique so you can have the name "Bob" and that's what shows up when you message people, but then you also have a unique version on your profile that looks something like "Bob#3922" I'm not sure what happens if 10,000 people pick the same name but as far as I know, there is no limitation to how many people can have the same username. So it seems almost impossible that this is some technical limitation but rather Discord cracking down on a common deception tactic.
    - Eavolution 4y ago
      It don't let you if there are no numbers left when I changed my discord name last
- margana 4y ago
  It's not. The reason for this is not technical (unless you think they literally filled their user database with every possible username permutation with the word 'clyde' in it). It's to make sure scammers can't use names with these words in it, because it might make more people consider those accounts legitimate.
vitiral 4y ago
Does the bot use every possible permutation of "Clyde"? It must be every Clyde that can ever exist?
- rabuse 4y ago
  Apparently it's do deal with fraudulent uses for their internal bot.
tomcam 4y ago
You can’t create a Gmail account containing the words support, gmail, google, and several other variations
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Huh, TIL. Is that documented anywhere? I confirmed that you're right by trying to create a new address, but I've never heard of this rule before.
  - dchest 4y ago
    It's a common security practice, to prevent scammers from using official-looking usernames, or even tricking services that verify domain ownership by sending email to postmaster@ or admin@. Such lists are usually kept secret, but there are a few open source word lists that people can adopt for their services, for example, https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      I discovered it innocently. I wanted to create a gmail address named support{myfirm}.gmail.com. Of course I instantly understood what you point out but then I had to discover all the other edge cases.
jxf 4y ago
This feels very adjacent to the Scunthorpe problem, except that the blocking is intentional here: > The Scunthorpe problem is unintentional blocking [...] because [...] text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an [...] unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- Sophira 4y ago
  Actually, in this case it's intentional that "Clyde" is blocked. That's the name of the "bot" that error messages on Discord use to make them friendlier. It's obviously not a good solution, but it's not an example of the Scunthorpe problem.
  - jxf 4y ago
    You're right. Updated.
anigbrowl 4y ago
This is sadly typical of Discord, who treat every problem as a nail even when offered a detailed explanation.
est 4y ago
Reminds me of a fun bug at RockstarGames's SocialClub https://twitter.com/tezfunz2/status/1565159942964891649 https://twitter.com/tezfunz2/status/1565159942964891649
- saghm 4y ago
  Interesting! It reminded me of the "our database schema doesn't allow people with the name Jeffrey": https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944 https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944
djmips 4y ago
Another bad case of co-opting a common word in tech - here with more than just annoying results.
marcyb5st 4y ago
On Swissair website there was a time where I couldn't purchase tickets because my name contains the name of a musical instrument. So out there there are people that did worse than that in my personal experience :(
- themaninthedark 4y ago
  Wait, what? I'm trying to figure out why that would exist but the only thing I can think of is that people were buying a ticket for their instruments rather then checking them and the airline wanted to try and stop the practice.
  - marcyb5st 4y ago
    I was shocked as well, and couldn't come up with an explanation either. My name is Marcello and the problem was the `cello` substring (an Italian name, but being Italian an official language in Switzerland they should have though about that). They removed it luckily!
    - Izkata 4y ago
      Now I'm wondering if there's a language where "mar" translates to "my"...
    - themaninthedark 4y ago
      That is the instrument that I had in mind when I was thinking of the ones that musicians buy tickets for, but I couldn't think of a name that had a collision with it. I had heard that some airlines may have tried to discourage the practice but this is the first I heard about such measures. Seems common for some travelers to book tickets ie. Tuba, Lastname. https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-mileage-plus-pre-merger/957417-buying-seat-musical-instrument.html https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-mileage-plus-pre-merg...
gloosx 4y ago
So you think it's bad? How about this: I just wanted to create an account there finally and it was suspended without me even entering it once, I also had to pass about 5 captchas to be able to sign-up, no VPNs, clear home IP Some shit-show is going on there right now, dunno
rozab 4y ago
It's really embarrassing if does actually allow visually indistinguishable variations like 'CIyde' or 'Clydе'. Impacting real users, while having zero effect on malicious actors
revskill 4y ago
I don't have account on stackoverflow or reddit because their authentication system is broken to me.
Waterluvian 4y ago
It feels like a UX faux pas to pick common names for stuff like this. I’ve got to imagine that some people named Alexa find it unfortunate and invasive that suddenly their name is used everywhere. At least “Siri” and “Hey Google” are less popular names for people.
83457 4y ago
Contact forms for US Senators and Representatives often have surprising issues like this. Reserved words in SQL sometimes get blocked as well as things like too many singles quotes or an odd number of single quotes. I've seen the name "Walter" blocked on many forms over the years. The worst part is that the sender just gets sent to a security or generic page with no idea why, often losing the message they created.
- jjice 4y ago
  That's upsetting, but what else would I expect from a senator's website that's probably been up for 25 years...

228 points by ajsfoux234 4y ago

Why don't bots have some other distinction? Like a blue tick or <blink> or some screenreader function? Why do their messages have to appear the same as humans? If bots should all operate in a distinctive space, give it that space. Mind you architectural foresight is hard so maybe they'll get there.

leduyquang753 4y ago
They do have the tick next to their names and yet they still have this nonsense in place anyway.
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  Because they don't trust the average discord user to not fall for someone who doesn't have a checkmark or system tag. And frankly they're right.
- AlfeG 4y ago
  Because it's not working. Put a big red flag that this is a scammer, and still there will be people falling into scam

BLKNSLVR 4y ago

This just reminds me of the birthday cake for Clint. Poor Clint. "Name on cake must not be Clint"

teddyh 4y ago

Change your name to “Sue” instead: https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-they-did-to-that-fourth-pacman-ghost/ https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-the...

smitop 4y ago

This happens because Discord has a system bot also named Clyde that mostly tells users when their messages fail to send (among other system messages).

midasuni 4y ago
Why not call it DiscordBot?
- ilyt 4y ago
  Coz someone tried to be cute instead of smart

NelsonMinar 4y ago

"Clyde is the name used for a fake bot in the client. It responds to specific Built-In slash commands (/timeout, /ban, /kick and /nick), and sends private messages with information or errors". https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Clyde https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Clyde

fire 4y ago

The key point here that was hard to find is that they and others had a username containing Clyde set already, and now can't update anything else about their profile because their username has come to be considered invalid. That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users Thanks for the clarification, but imagining it's pretty easy that this could just be a bug, e.g. they knew they wanted to prevent future usernames from having "clyde", and maybe even realized some existing clydes would be grandfathered in, but didn't realize it would prevent existing clydes from updating anything else on their profile.
- fire 4y ago
  yeah, it would be pretty simple to skip validation of the username if it didn't change
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
Sounds like they're doing a PUT when they should be doing a PATCH.
plusminusplus 4y ago
If you use a + sign in your email, some services accept it at sign up but not later on, when users try to update it.
- fire 4y ago
  yeah, I've had this happen a number of times because the service was treating the `+` as a space in either the signup or the update, and I've had some success forcing it by replacing `+` with `%2B`

userbinator 4y ago

This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names (and perhaps distinguished through other means too); if the error was instead "Username cannot contain 'discord'", it'd be more obvious.

jameshart 4y ago
This of course rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as a 'regular name'. I'm obliged to link you to 'falsehoods programmers believe about names' now. I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- userbinator 4y ago
  There are certainly far more Clydes than there are Discords (has anyone even been legally named Discord before?) I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules. ..."then change them", as someone might say. But that article seems to be mostly about the edge-cases. I don't think someone named Clyde is an edge-case, nor would someone named Bonnie, for that matter.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    So I perhaps should have been more clear. If your plan in choosing a name for your bot is to choose one that won't collide with a human, you are going to run into the fact that humans have a lot of very different names. Hence the link to the 'falsehoods' piece. The US Census of 1950, for example, has a lot of Descords, Descards, Dicords, Dioscords, and... in PA, a Rosa B Discord, in NYC, a Mr Discord. In general, all I'm saying is, it is far better if your intention is to allow people to choose their name, to not put any arbitrary restriction in place with the justification that 'it probably won't affect anyone'. If there's one thing people really care about it's their name. And no matter how unlikely you think it is that someone will run into your restriction... you're almost certainly wrong.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Why is an internal system in the same namespace as users? I wonder whether there are constraints that made it difficult to implement this functionality in another way, or this is just a bad design decision.

taberiand 4y ago
It's probably a mix of both. Namespacing often seems to be an afterthought in many systems, and it can be hard to refactor in once an architecture has solidified. It's not always the wrong choice to mingle identifiers of different types, but I think often people err on the side of convenience (/ laziness) instead of thinking through all of the potential issues.
- askiiart 4y ago
  I think it could also be for the purpose of preventing imposters, as what Clyde says is what Discord says.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The discord username namespace is weird. You get to set a display name which doesn't have to be unique so you can have the name "Bob" and that's what shows up when you message people, but then you also have a unique version on your profile that looks something like "Bob#3922" I'm not sure what happens if 10,000 people pick the same name but as far as I know, there is no limitation to how many people can have the same username. So it seems almost impossible that this is some technical limitation but rather Discord cracking down on a common deception tactic.
  - Eavolution 4y ago
    It don't let you if there are no numbers left when I changed my discord name last
margana 4y ago
It's not. The reason for this is not technical (unless you think they literally filled their user database with every possible username permutation with the word 'clyde' in it). It's to make sure scammers can't use names with these words in it, because it might make more people consider those accounts legitimate.

vitiral 4y ago

Does the bot use every possible permutation of "Clyde"? It must be every Clyde that can ever exist?

rabuse 4y ago
Apparently it's do deal with fraudulent uses for their internal bot.

tomcam 4y ago

You can’t create a Gmail account containing the words support, gmail, google, and several other variations

jeffbee 4y ago
Huh, TIL. Is that documented anywhere? I confirmed that you're right by trying to create a new address, but I've never heard of this rule before.
- dchest 4y ago
  It's a common security practice, to prevent scammers from using official-looking usernames, or even tricking services that verify domain ownership by sending email to postmaster@ or admin@. Such lists are usually kept secret, but there are a few open source word lists that people can adopt for their services, for example, https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    I discovered it innocently. I wanted to create a gmail address named support{myfirm}.gmail.com. Of course I instantly understood what you point out but then I had to discover all the other edge cases.

jxf 4y ago

This feels very adjacent to the Scunthorpe problem, except that the blocking is intentional here: > The Scunthorpe problem is unintentional blocking [...] because [...] text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an [...] unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Sophira 4y ago
Actually, in this case it's intentional that "Clyde" is blocked. That's the name of the "bot" that error messages on Discord use to make them friendlier. It's obviously not a good solution, but it's not an example of the Scunthorpe problem.
- jxf 4y ago
  You're right. Updated.

anigbrowl 4y ago

This is sadly typical of Discord, who treat every problem as a nail even when offered a detailed explanation.

est 4y ago

Reminds me of a fun bug at RockstarGames's SocialClub https://twitter.com/tezfunz2/status/1565159942964891649 https://twitter.com/tezfunz2/status/1565159942964891649

saghm 4y ago
Interesting! It reminded me of the "our database schema doesn't allow people with the name Jeffrey": https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944 https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944

djmips 4y ago

Another bad case of co-opting a common word in tech - here with more than just annoying results.

marcyb5st 4y ago

On Swissair website there was a time where I couldn't purchase tickets because my name contains the name of a musical instrument. So out there there are people that did worse than that in my personal experience :(

themaninthedark 4y ago
Wait, what? I'm trying to figure out why that would exist but the only thing I can think of is that people were buying a ticket for their instruments rather then checking them and the airline wanted to try and stop the practice.
- marcyb5st 4y ago
  I was shocked as well, and couldn't come up with an explanation either. My name is Marcello and the problem was the `cello` substring (an Italian name, but being Italian an official language in Switzerland they should have though about that). They removed it luckily!
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Now I'm wondering if there's a language where "mar" translates to "my"...
  - themaninthedark 4y ago
    That is the instrument that I had in mind when I was thinking of the ones that musicians buy tickets for, but I couldn't think of a name that had a collision with it. I had heard that some airlines may have tried to discourage the practice but this is the first I heard about such measures. Seems common for some travelers to book tickets ie. Tuba, Lastname. https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-mileage-plus-pre-merger/957417-buying-seat-musical-instrument.html https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-mileage-plus-pre-merg...

gloosx 4y ago

So you think it's bad? How about this: I just wanted to create an account there finally and it was suspended without me even entering it once, I also had to pass about 5 captchas to be able to sign-up, no VPNs, clear home IP Some shit-show is going on there right now, dunno

rozab 4y ago

It's really embarrassing if does actually allow visually indistinguishable variations like 'CIyde' or 'Clydе'. Impacting real users, while having zero effect on malicious actors

revskill 4y ago

I don't have account on stackoverflow or reddit because their authentication system is broken to me.

Waterluvian 4y ago

It feels like a UX faux pas to pick common names for stuff like this. I’ve got to imagine that some people named Alexa find it unfortunate and invasive that suddenly their name is used everywhere. At least “Siri” and “Hey Google” are less popular names for people.

83457 4y ago

Contact forms for US Senators and Representatives often have surprising issues like this. Reserved words in SQL sometimes get blocked as well as things like too many singles quotes or an odd number of single quotes. I've seen the name "Walter" blocked on many forms over the years. The worst part is that the sender just gets sent to a security or generic page with no idea why, often losing the message they created.

jjice 4y ago
That's upsetting, but what else would I expect from a senator's website that's probably been up for 25 years...