Should account name contain locale characters?

or only alnum?

[Xuefer]

many program(forum/bbs/etc..) seems to limit account to [a-zA-Z0-9_-]+
but some of the webmasters changed the code to allow locale characters, GBK/Big5/german/japanese/...
and a few website, still keep the limitation, and added a alternative "nickname", such as 163.com, they display "nickname[account]"

how do u guys think of this problem?
why do they do in that different ways,
and it there anything for such a webmaster/webdesigner to take care of?

[bill]

We had an intranet forum where we allowed Japanese usernames. The problem was that when we wanted to expand use of the forum and port data to other commercial packages there were difficulties. Some poor person had to transfer all the Japanese names into [a-zA-Z0-9_-]+ manually.

[Xuefer]

and how do u think of "nick[account]" pair?
and also, ms passport use "nick[email]" i.e: "nick[account@domain]"

[bill]

In that case the nick field is separate from the important data like the actual account name or e-mail address. In that situation I don't see any problems really. It's when you have things like the account name using non-standard characters that you run into problems.

[Xuefer]

thanks bill.
that's correct but how do the user may feel
but if the whole site shown up the link as nick[account@domain], are they satisfy with it? and btw, there isn't much room to place it on web.

and.. if possible, can u tell me how u do the work to transfer their name? by telling them to alter it?

i've had a look at msn messenger, to see how it make use of nick <account@domain>
but can anyone recommend me a forum/bbs site which based on ms passport?
i searched but don't yet find one
just wanna learn how they display the link