Why are we not allowed to have @ in our usernames?

Question

I know that / and + are used in urls, so having those will do weird things to our pages, but why not @?

Comments

Probably so the usernames won't be email addresses or something like that. Also that tag :P

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But why would you want @ in your username...

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Could we please stop e.e?

Answer 1

The reason is because you can log in with either your email address or username. If we allowed @ then it's not possible to tell (in the code) whether you are using a username or email.

For example one user could have the address [email protected] and a different user could use that as their username.

Comments

That makes a lot of sense now.