when can you use ASCII?

[KailaniGreyson]

I was trying to change my display name in my profile by using ASCII but each time it would say I was using invalid characters and I am not sure why, because my old avi, I had changed it using ASCII. This Avi is only a week and so old, does that have a effect on it?

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Kailani,

I've never tried it myself, but here's a page that discusses it...

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/TNT-Second-Life-Tips-Tricks/FUN-Awesomize-your-profile-with-Unicode-and-ASCII-art/ba-p/652364

[Rolig Loon]

You an use it when you want to annoy the heck out of people who try to read or pronounce your name, or who run contest boards in clubs that can't handle the funny symbols, or who are just trying to say a friendly but unwanted "hello".  You can also use it when you want to run the risk of finding yourself locked out of SL.  If you use high-bit ASCII characters in Display names or Group tags, you can bump into this nasty server bug that prevents login.  There are lots of times to use those fun ASCII characters. 

[steph Arnott]

Added to other answers. You will find some ignoring you because those types of names are really irritating on the eyes and brain.

[jeetsshimis]

while ASCII is fun and full of flare to use. It's not really the best methode to modify your display name. Just for the fact that It is a code language. Hence if you use the right characters mainly anything bigger then 7bits as fore mentioned you risk locking yourself out. If you really want to flare up your user name use Unicode its universally supported and you dont have to worry about locking yourself out with it. also with ASCII aka a pretty much dead coding lauange the charcter tables that the server will accept is always changing so again not a great methode.