Work around invalid Messenger usernames

May 28, '02 08:10:21AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

MSN Messenger Service forbids certain words as a user name. If you enter any one word that Messenger doesn't want you to abuse, it says "The display name you chose was invalid. Please choose another display name and try again."

This is all very well for blocking "bad" words, but there are a few words that are invalid which are very questionable, like "help", "info", "www", etc. (complete list).

To get around this, just change the first letter of the word into the 'URL quoted' version of the letter(a '%' followed by the hex ASCII code). So to use 'help' you would type '%68elp', or for 'www' it would be '%77ww'.

[Editor's note: I actually ran into this when I tried to use "www.macosxhints.com" as a display name at one point, and was wondering what caused the problem ... now I know!]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020528081021669