Alliance Name

[TinyTobias]

Which one of you brilliant minds went out of their way to make it so we can’t add special characters like question marks to our alliance names? Feel any need to elaborate the thought process behind that one?

 

[Harlems369th]

Which one of you brilliant minds went out of their way to make it so we can’t add special characters like question marks to our alliance names? Feel any need to elaborate the thought process behind that one?

Excellent question!

I'm not sure who decided that. No further elaboration. There can sometimes be issues with special characters and how they're displayed, which likely led to their omission. Maybe the decision came down to simply not liking punctuation?

 

[TinyTobias]

Excellent question!

I'm not sure who decided that. No further elaboration. There can sometimes be issues with special characters and how they're displayed, which likely led to their omission. Maybe the decision came down to simply not liking punctuation?

Are you sure about that? If you have a mobile device and can download the game DomiNations from the App or Google Play store, you can find an absurd number of alliances that still have special characters in their alliance names. Meaning, if this is indeed an issue, you would not let these teams grandfather their names in the same way you allowed players with hex color codes in their names to be grandfathered in. @BHGSarah claims it somehow impacts the game mechanics but It doesn't think it takes a coder to recognize that alliance name should have absolutely zero impact on the games mechanics and if it does, the game is beyond broken on the back end. The community, which I know you all so diligently care about, believes you made this change strictly to prevent teams from creating war agreements via name change on war planning day. So please Harlems, elaborate further for us.

 

[nobodyknowsthetrouble]

Meaning, if this is indeed an issue, you would not let these teams grandfather their name

THIS


It would be interesting to know exactly what is being blocked. This does not seem entirely conclusive, because, for example:
allowed: Ø and º
blocked: ○ and °


But we already know that BHG
1) processes strings incorrectly, so e.g. usernames with trailing spaces (due to autocomplete) result in incorrectly colored speedup requests.
So 2) BHG does not clean up the strings properly.
3) BHG designs non-transparent rules and does not explain them, e.g., word filters in chat. If these are also faulty, e.g., overblocking, then support ignores this issue.

Nevertheless, some kudos: they have solved the alliance name input better than chat. The input rejects characters directly. In chat, our text is deleted, which is annoying because we often have to tinker due to the character limit and then the text is rejected for no reason.

 

[BHGSarah]

Sorry for not responding sooner -- was on vacation until this morning. There are a handful of special characters that cause issues like Harlems said, which led to us putting in a task to do a better job of removing those characters from alliance and player names. However, we didn't do a great job of specifying which "special characters" should be omitted when handing it off to a dev for implementation.

allowed: Ø and º
blocked: ○ and °

Yeah, this doesn't seem right to me at all. I'll go ahead and enter a task in our system to change the sanitization code to be more consistent about what characters are allowed.

you can find an absurd number of alliances that still have special characters in their alliance names.

This is going to be a multi-step process. We implemented the part where we prevent the special characters from being input in the first place, but we still need to implement the part that strips characters from existing alliance names. It's on the to-do list.

but It doesn't think it takes a coder to recognize that alliance name should have absolutely zero impact on the games mechanics and if it does, the game is beyond broken on the back end

To clarify, it's not that the alliance names are causing actual changes to how the core game behaves. For example, it's not as if I can put a question mark in my alliance name and have that change how my troops behave. It has more to do with how the alliance data is being stored and retrieved. Can't go into any more detail than that for now.