nus-se-script
commented
11 months ago Team's Response
We very intentionally made event names contain only alphanumeric and white space characters. We made this very clear in the user guide as well. We did this to keep event names simple and also to allow for better search results with the find command. Users can still do @nus by naming it more intentionally like "my nus event" and it provides better search results as well. This is an intentional design choice and not a feature flaw.
Items for the Tester to Verify
:question: Issue response
Team chose [response.NotInScope]
- [x] I disagree
Reason for disagreement: Stating the problem clearly in your UG and "Intentional design" does not prevent feature flaws. If I decided to make my font sizes in my program unreadable but said it was intentional because I like the style, putting it in my UG, should that prevent me from receiving feature flaws from the fact that my users can't see anything in my program?
"We did this to keep event names simple and also to allow for better search results with the find command."
- Why is keeping event names simple (by limiting special characters) beneficial to your target audience? I highly doubt your audience will get confused simply from seeing a special character. Even if a portion of your users wish to keep names simple, they can simply not put special characters in their event names instead of you forcing everyone to do so. This way, you cater to both users that don't want special characters in event names and users who don't mind.
- How does preventing special characters lead to better search results with the find command?
- How exactly do you define "better" search?
In general, the group's response does not provide a convincing value proposition for prohibiting special characters.
This issue falls under overzealous input validation because blocking special characters does not add any value but allowing it does, as can be seen by the "@Nus" example in the original bug report, and other potential special characters, like chinese characters or the ! sign.
From the UG:
Event name can only use Use a-z , A-Z , 0-9 and whitespaces only. However, there's plenty of events that use special characters in their event names (most commonly @, as part of "@Nus") and blocking this can annoy users that are part of events using these special characters.