- RigZ Boi
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- Intrepid Legendary Member
I acknowledge my user name is stupid. However, I promise I'm not.
Disclaimer: The latter is a lie.
I'm still pretty sure its aliens, mate.
Posted by: dazarobbo
My theory (and this doesn't apply to just bungie.net) is that maybe there are/were scripts or configurations which accepted a single parameter of input and used that to determine whether the input was referring to either the id of a user or the username of the user.
For example, if you've ever seen sites where they give you those "personalised URLs" (I like to call them flat links) where you can reach your profile by either your username or memberID. They look like this:
http://example.com/user/{username}
OR
http://example.com/user/{user_id}
If someone's username is "1337", the server will - in all likelihood - be programmed to first test whether the input contains all digits and, if it does, get the user's profile according to those digits - their user id. The problem should then become obvious - there's no guarantee that "1337"'s id is 1337, so the wrong profile would likely be shown. If you have at least one non-numeric character in the input, the server won't see it as a number and can look up a profile by a username instead.
However, this still doesn't address why there's the condition that the first character be a letter. For that, I'm at a loss.