This is second time in just over a week that my display name got messed up after I changed it

[DarkshadeZero]

Yesterday I changed my display name, and it showed up above my head just fine for a while. But then I teleported somewhere, and when I got there, it showed as just the first two characters of my name, and the rest was deleted. Why is this happening? I don't think I should have to keep waiting a whole week each time it gets messed up since that's not my fault. How can I make sure it doesn't get changed again on its own after I change my name?

If anyone can help me, I would really be grateful. Thank you!

[Rolig Loon]

My guess is that you tried to make a Display Name with illegal characters instead of staying with the standard font.  You'll find that a lot of the strange hi-bit UTF codes that make "fancy" letters annoy the hell out of other residents and make a mess of scripted systems (like Prize chairs and Sploders and a lot of vendors) but they are still accepted by Linden Lab's system.  The trouble is, you never know which odd characters are just annoying and which ones are fatal.  The best idea is to avoid them all, just in case.

[Rolig Loon]

Or, forget about using those special characters.  They really are very annoying to many people (like DJs and merchants)  and they can be difficult for scripts to interpret, so you may be ignored by some vendors or game scripts.

[DarkshadeZero]

thank you for your quick response. I've seen so many people on SL, probably a very large portion of the ppl on SL, who have fancy-looking characters in their name. Why does it work for them? I got the error message several times when I was trying to change it that told me that I entered invalid characters, so then I went into my groups and looked at the members lists and found characters I liked that were accepted. Then it accepted my desired new display name. But then it changed it. I tried characters that were already in use by others, so why can they use them but it won't let me?

[Chroma Starlight]

19 minutes ago, DarkshadeZero said:

 Then it accepted my desired new display name. But then it changed it. I tried characters that were already in use by others, so why can they use them but it won't let me?

It's possible the client sent a command that was filtered out by the cloud. The client will happily do whatever it believes it can, but sometimes the cloud provides a reality check. That must not be the way to do the thing you're attempting, if the specific characters you're entering are actually even possible (as above, etc). Try different things, or better yet, make friends with someone and learn from them.

[Jenna Huntsman]

Unicode in a name is an absolute nightmare because a mere 9 times out of 10 it won't display properly on a different font / different viewer / a different computer or all of the above. It's highly dependant on what localization the operating system is using, if the font supports Unicode characters, etc.

Not to mention non-native English speakers have a hard time trying to read what is essentially obfuscated text.

TLDR; don't use Unicode in your display name, for the reasons given above this post as well as the reasons given here. It's a nightmare. Don't do it.

Edited April 17, 2021 by Jenna Huntsman
Correcting some faux pas

[Rowan Amore]

But ALL the cool kids use it!!! (sarcasm font)

*pouts*

Edited April 17, 2021 by Rowan Amore

[Kathlen Onyx]

On 4/16/2021 at 5:06 PM, DarkshadeZero said:

thank you for your quick response. I've seen so many people on SL, probably a very large portion of the ppl on SL, who have fancy-looking characters in their name. Why does it work for them? I got the error message several times when I was trying to change it that told me that I entered invalid characters, so then I went into my groups and looked at the members lists and found characters I liked that were accepted. Then it accepted my desired new display name. But then it changed it. I tried characters that were already in use by others, so why can they use them but it won't let me?

When I did this the same thing happened to me. What I did was change the name, make sure it stuck and then logged out and back in before going anywhere. That seemed to work.

 

 

 

[Nova Convair]

We have a different set of unicode pages.

The viewer accepts everything but the server has a limited number of codepages it seems.
So if you send your garbage to the server it will dump everything that it can't handle.

You can try once per week what works or steal working characters from other avatars names.