I’ve seen a bunch of players lately with hex strings at the end of their username lately - when I ask them, they say “I don’t know why” that’s there.
Anyone know what’s up with that?
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Hmmm… It’s usually Asian players who have this, might it be that there is something going wrong with unicode characters being encoded incorrectly at some step of the process?
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The strings are not valid unicode codepoints, so if that’s the case it’s more than just unicode bytes being rendered as hex.
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There are non-unicode Asian encodings – has Japanese shifted from SJIS, yet? :>
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Wikipedia says that Unicode is used on about 90% of Japanese websites, with the rest of them employing SJIS and EUC-JP.
Yeah, I would be surprised if japanese browsers were inputting jis by default, and this random example doesn’t seem to convert to jis: Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS
Sorry about previous post - first time here, need to understand the system.
I don’t think the hex characters are S-JIS. I will look at them a little more and see if I can decode them.
I would not assume the example user name " TioTom2e7161b25327434d" is an Asian player: Tio Tom means “Uncle Tom” in Spanish 
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Okay, I checked all the CJKV encoding systems and I do not think the hex is any “Asian” characters … sorry. Maybe site admin will know the answer.
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I think “decoding” is possibly not the right tactic.
They seem to be on newer accounts, always at the end. Some kind of unique ID that’s getting appended to the username in error?
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I was curious so I just tried to see what those hex numbers could mean.
So I went here https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/hex-to-ascii.html and tried all possible encodings.
It seems to me that UTF-16 gives best results but maybe it’s just because I don’t know japanese. 
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These are pretty rare kanji, so seems unlikely…
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Might be totally off the wall, but I heard this in chat - players coming/registering from Facebook?
Please do not shoot the messenger.
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Because it’s year of the 0x
Bah-dum tss 
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I also do not think that is a correct decode. ‘憲’ is not uncommon, e.g. ‘憲法記念日’ is a national holiday in Japan, but the other two kanji are extremely rare - not sure they are even used in modern Japanese.
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So far, from the perspective of the moderator panel, these names appear to be created by the person themselves, for a certain class of users (country etc).
It is surprising indeed to hear that a user said they don’t know where the numbers came from.
If anyone has a chance to validate that by talking to one of these people and exploring, that’d be great.
This is not the only type of mysterious pattern in usernames. There is another that look like this:
2taylorc8122th7
(not a real example)
These all have email accounts on the same server, but with different usernames.
Then there are the
20M1-froodko
mob. These are 99% certainy students from a particular institution using a name given to them … they all have a corresponding email at that institution.
And these are by no means the only username patters.
Generally, we have assumed that these are classes or other groups like that.
So as I said, it will be interesting to hear more about the hexadecimal-ending crowd, if they are not externally issued IDs.
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Sometimes I see usernames with decimal strings appended as well.
Here’s example, from jane20140819 Discussion about Q16,Q13
That’s pretty clearly the international-style date 2014-08-19, but that’s not the date when the account was created… I doubt it’s a date of birth, that would be pushing it a bit.
School enrolment date, ie. a school account?
Met another:
He said the string was automatically appended when he signed up with a Google account. Doesn’t seem ideal.
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It comes from the social auth stuff, not a bug, but not great behavior I agree
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Thank you anoek6b9cc152563d !
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