Username Limits

[baystateoftheart]

I would suggest a rule to prevent usernames from being "not safe for work." During lulls at my job, I go to this site, but I don't want my coworker who sits next to me looking over and being repulsed by people's usernames.

I know there is a rule against excessive swearing, but it might not cover these usernames I am talking about. If a mod wants more information, feel free to PM me.

I'm not asking to remove distasteful language from the forums or comments sections, because people being able to express how they feel in words is important, but removing distasteful usernames seems like a pretty reasonable action to make the site a more welcoming place.
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[albummaster]

I agree about NSFW usernames, however it's difficult to police this at the point of signing up as there are so many ways to get around it e.g joining words together without a space, swapping characters (e.g. a 1 for an i), so in practice I'm not sure how this could be enforced unless there was a list of banned words that can't be contained within a username (which may help to improve things, but will never cover every eventuality) and some words contain swear words within a non-offensive word, so you may get false positives.

[baystateoftheart]

To clarify, I'm not suggesting a mechanism to stop people from registering NSFW usernames - that would be hard to implement, potentially ineffective, and probably a waste of your time and energy. What I am suggesting is that active users who have NSFW usernames be contacted by you or a moderator and compelled to change their usernames. Perhaps their activity could be hidden on the site until they choose a new username (have no idea how feasible that is, if at all). Who should I PM about the usernames I am referring to?
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[albummaster]

Hi, please PM me the usernames and I'll take action to get them changed. Agree that usernames shouldn't contain profanity and probably a blind eye has been used so far, but as with everything the problem is trying to judge where the boundary is between what is acceptable and what is not. I'm not sure it's feasible to hide their activity until their names are changed as that's quite a big chunk of work which I don't have the spare capacity for right now, but let's see how this progresses and hopefully the users in question are cooperative. (There is also the 'ignore user' feature which could be used in the meantime to hide those users from view.)