Help for CSAIL usernames

A username, also called a login name, is the name you use to identify yourself to a server or workstation. It's also the part of your email address to the left of the “@” sign. We enforce the following restrictions on usernames:

• Usernames must be between 1 and 32 characters long. However, limitations in some services such as AFS mean that you should normally not exceed 16 characters, and some systems (not maintained by us) may be limited to just 8.
• The first character must be a digit, a letter, or an underscore.
• The second and subsequent characters may be any combination of digits, letters, underscores, and hyphens.
• At least one character must be a letter.
• Non-ASCII characters are not permitted.

Case is not significant: For historical reasons, this database will fold all usernames to uppercase, but nearly everywhere else they will be folded to lowercase.

Note that it is difficult to change a username once it has been used. Please take care to choose one that you will be happy with for as long as you have your account. Some of the possibilities that other people have used include:

• Initials
• A given name or family name
• A well-known nickname
• First initial and family name, or Given name and last initial

It is still possible to change a username if you have legally changed your full name and do not wish to have your old name as a part of your username, but it requires a good amount of work by system administrators to track down all of the places where your username is referenced and make sure that they are all changed (leaving appropriate pointers behind), so we ask that you do not request this lightly.

Why do we ask for a username?

Your username is the unique identifier for your account in many services, including electronic mail.