Life is grand

The day I have been dreading for nigh on a year has arrived. Since Yahoo! bought Flickr there has been the impending merger of not just their cash coffers but of their sign-on systems. That day will be the 15th of March and from the looks of it you must comply.

Like Photub I am stuck in the unenviable position of not having my ideal Yahoo! sign-on. I used to have it but since I rarely used Yahoo! I ignored it and eventually forgot it. I spent a good few hours trying to convince Yahoo! to couch up the account but it all hinges on an uncomfirmed postal code that I cannot remember. All the other details I provide to Yahoo! are correct, it is just 4 digits of a postal code which are preventing me.

Why Yahoo! can’t just send a new password for that account to the email on record which I know and own and control and check every 5 minutes, I don’;t know. They won’t. They want a piece of irrelevant data (Yahoo! have never posted me anything, why do they need my postal code?) Not too mention the account has been inactive for at least a year now. Can’t they kill it?

It isn’t the end of the world and it just means I need to sign up some bastardised Yahoo! account name but it isn’t ideal either.

A bitter sweet day for Flickr. It will feel strange signing into it with YahoosChihuahua411Pwned.

Can anyone explain to me why most systems place restrictions on usernames? Why must a username never contain a space? Why must it be longer than 5 characters but shorter than 24? Why can’t I have a / followed by a ! and then a ” in my username?

If a user wants a username of Bob Marley (note the space) then why can’t he have it? Why does he, without fail, have to enter BobMarley?

Is this just a hangover from older times where resources were scarce and text handling libraries rudimentary?

Personally I prefer using my email address as my username as it is almost always unique and available on a system I have yet to try. But my mum doesn’t want a complicated email address as her username. She wants to use Paul’s Mum. Why not?