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Does it involve zero-width spaces, or do you have to marry into the family? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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I always thought the Swiss were sneakier than they appear to be. 
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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Damnit, that was hilarious.
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Richard Deeming wrote: Are there any good examples of HTML display names?
yes
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Who? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: I'd be inclined to restrict all display names to plain text. Are there any good examples of HTML display names?
That gets my five.
[edit] Or it would, if an error wasn't preventing it [/edit]
Richard Deeming wrote: Letting users choose and use display names which are already in use could easily cause confusion. Imagine how many spam posts we'll get from "Chris Maunder"! Even without the radioactive Bob icon on the post, we might still fall for it.
Then simply display duplicate names in a different colour, or in italics. If non-dupe names are plain text, then the dupes'll stand out as dupes.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Richard Deeming wrote: You could try adding a counter or member ID after the name [...]
I think this would be the much better way to solve the problem of letting users choose the name they want.
May be a little reference to the Battle.net of Blizzard; they let users choose the name they want but add automatically a hash <#> followed by a random (at least I guess so) 4 digit number. So all users, even with the same name, have unique Displaynames.
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I think it makes more sense to 'retire' accounts that haven't been active at all for (say) 3 years. That way you free up display names of people who really aren't here, without getting into a position of allowing clashes of active members, or silly games (for example imagine Griff decided he wanted to troll me, he could set his name to mine and he would get priority as he's made more contributions lately).
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But some legends, like Luc, who haven't contributed lately shouldn't be affected.
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Maybe some sort of sliding scale: if you have less than 1K rep points, your account is retired after 18 months of inactivity; 10K for five years; 100K for 10 years; etc.
Of course, that means Griff's account would still be alive and kicking at the heat-death of the universe. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Christian will be the only one left to wave goodbye to him! 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Wow! That shows how much attention I've been giving rep points! You almost think that Griff was one of the Founding Sheep Shaggers Members! 
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger Wright wrote: That shows how much attention I've been giving rep points!
Ditto! I didn't even know or care that that link existed. Now, all I have to do is increase mine by 300 times to rival Griff's!
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I've been around for over 9 years now and unless you get a ton of up votes your points don't rise very quickly.
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With an average of 37 messages per year, I'm not surprised!
I've posted an average of 210 messages per year, most of which have been utter rubbish.
Griff's posted an average of 5547 per year, almost all of which involve sheep. Plus an average of 2669 QA answers per year. Not forgetting 2245 comments, 12 tips, and 1 article.
The point is, the more time you waste spend on the site, the more points you're likely to pick up. And when you get more points, you get ... well, a higher score. Which is nice. If you like that sort of thing.
If it makes you feel any better, open your profile page[^] and press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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I'm not that worried about points, more as if what I post will help someone.
Which is why I don't post that much.
But is is nice to see them go up sometimes
Iv'e tried that once, but i forgot what the amount was.
A squillion points
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Articles can help, I'm getting 15-20 points a day even if I don't do anything because of people reading those and downloading the source zips. But yeah if you care about reputation then being active in reputation hotspots like here, language forums and Q&A is a good idea.
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All of mine are done as blog post, they don't seem to hold as much weight as the ones posted directly.
I use Live writer to write with. I have trouble with the online article writer.I'm not a web guy.
Even a my Source code download is only worth 1 point, but if I download someone elses I get 2 points.
Oh well I'm not here for the points or the prestige anyway.
I just hope what I write will help others.
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BobJanova wrote: I think it makes more sense to 'retire' accounts that haven't been active at all for (say) 3 years
If that person has posted an article, regardless of how old it is (OK, maybe a decade is a good cutoff) they should still have the right to "their" name.
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Chris Maunder wrote: they should still have the right to "their" name.
Says the guy who can bypass the spoofing software and recreate himself. 
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I think retiring unused names (and allowing others to 'reserve' them) would be a good idea.
When I signed up I wanted 'StarNamer' as I use it on many other sites (e.g. StackOverflow[^], AskUbuntu[^] and other StackExchange sites). Unfortunately, it was already registered so I had to be satisfied with 'StarNamer_'[^]. As far as I can tell, the original 'starnamer'[^] has never posted anything and simply has the initial 100 points for signing up!
Really frustrating! It wouldn't be so annoying if (s)he was a reasonably active member!
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Somewhere in this thread is a post from Chris where he did replicate his name by creating his name with HTML tags that didn't display and bypassed the spoofing software. He might have fixed that glitch by now, but his second copy still exists.
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