SL Name Questions

Can anyone answer any of the following:

1. What is the maximum length of a SL name (how many characters in total, and does that include the space between forename and lastname or not)?

2. Can you have Initials? eg J. Smith (or is the period not allowed)

3. Can you have spaces in your forename, to produce, for example, Jamie Lee Curtis

4. Are only alphanumeric characters permitted? What about underscores?

5. Are non-western character formats supported, eg Cyrillic, or Arabic character sets?

6. Where did you get the information from? I scoured the KB and could only find issues relating to changing a name, and creating a custom last name.

Rock

When choosing a new avatar name, this came up:

Length: 2–31 characters. Letters or numbers only. Case matters.

When I attempted to use katakana or Cyrillic, I was told:

Names can contain only letters and numbers.

It also didn't like spaces, underscores or dots.

Kitsy ^.^

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits#Avatar: Max. length of avatar name - 31 for first name, 31 for last name, 63 in total (including the space).

Why not go through the motions of making an alt?

You don't actually have to make one, but you can try various names and see which are accepted and which are rejected.


PPP (Any rules will quickly become obvious.)

1. What is the maximum length of a SL name (how many characters in total, and does that include the space between forename and lastname or not)?

31 for first name, 31 for last name, 63 in total (including the space).

2. Can you have Initials? eg J. Smith (or is the period not allowed)

No.

3. Can you have spaces in your forename, to produce, for example, Jamie Lee Curtis

No

4. Are only alphanumeric characters permitted? What about underscores?

As far as I know, only letters and numbers are allowed. No underscores, dashes, periods...

5. Are non-western character formats supported, eg Cyrillic, or Arabic character sets?

No.

6. Where did you get the information from? I scoured the KB and could only find issues relating to changing a name, and creating a custom last name.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits for the name length limits, the rest from experience.

It tells you on the signup page, length 2-31 characters, only letters and numbers.

I was actually doing an exercise on finding the info within the KB, Wiki or elsewhere. It all started when a friend (from France) asked, 'can accented letters be used in my SL name?' I could find zero anywhere in the searches I made to answer this, so I then started to look for the answers to other common questions people might ask about names. It also didn't help when FAQ pages in the KB were sorted alphabetically, so a question such as: My Avatar is all black, what is wrong? is sorted under the letter 'M'.

Rock

I did find that, by trying a test run, as I could find nothing in the KB or wiki (the info might be there, but searching for it is the main problem, and I am really trying to find how people go about finding information). 2-31 characters does not say whether this applies to the whole name, lastname included, or just to the forename, or about the space in between. A French 'c' cidilla, ç, or accented 'e', è, or German Umlaut, ü, are also letters, but the signup page does not state which character sets are permitted.

Rock

To elaborate a bit on these:

On many online communities, especially the older ones, it became common to make unique names by adding numbers to first names, e.g. John1234. This approach is less common in SL for various reasons. Middle names are a more creative solution, but as has been pointed out, there's no way to introduces spaces or other punctuation.

The solution is to use mixed case (known in the software community as Camel Case). For example, you could have JohnQuincy Adams. It's not as clear as a space or underscore, but it works and you quickly get used to it. There can be issues with poorer quality scripted objects that do case-sensitive name comparisons, but otherwise it's the best alternative I know. Using it for initials also works, e.g. JQuincy Adams, but is a bit harder to read because the brain relies on the difference in heights of the letters to break it up.