As stated in MBS-8708, there are some editor accounts with very strange names that contain control characters (newlines, TAB, DEL, …). Most of them are probably accounts created by spammers’ scripts; some real users possibly typed or pasted control characters by accident (and may then wonder why they can’t log in again, because they can’t reproduce the control characters). This causes issues on our end, too, because these strange names would need special treatment in some cases (e.g. MBS-8708).

We should simply disallow these strange names and run editor names through the same cleanup function that we already use for MB data (e.g., artist names and track titles). This should be done both on account creation and on login, so that people who do reproduce their strange control characters still can log in. Existing accounts need to be migrated by a script so that their owners aren’t shut out. This will affect less than thousand accounts, most of them due to whitespace trimming. (There are about 100 accounts with control characters and about 700 that have leading, trailing or duplicate spaces in their names.)