User:Stwalkerster/Notes on cloaks

The documentation on Meta states:

All cloaks must conform to the DNS hostname specification as described in RFC 1034 and RFC 1035. They may include upper- and lower-case Latin characters, Arabic numerals and dashes. They may not include spaces or underscores; hyphens should be used instead.
Begin only with a letter and contain only DNS compliant characters a–z, A–Z, 0–9 and the hyphen (-)

However, this doesn't seem to paint the entire picture. This is what requirements actually seem to exist in the source code:

Cloaks cannot be set on MARKed accounts (easily, can be overridden)^{[note 1]}
Cloaks cannot contain certain special characters (@, !, ?, *, space, ', ")^{[src 1]}
Cloaks cannot be exactly :, /, ., or empty (NUL first byte) ^{[src 2]}^{[src 3]}
Cloaks cannot contain ASCII control chars (<32) ^{[src 4]}^{[src 5]}
Cloaks must contain at least one of :, /, .^{[src 6]}
Cloaks cannot be longer than 63 characters^{[src 7]}^{[src 8]}
The character after the last / cannot be a digit.^{[src 9]} This means foo/bar/baz/3qux is banned, but foo/3/2/3/4/. is technically allowed. (char after last / is not a digit).
The cloak can only contain characters a–z, A–Z, 0–9 and the hyphen (-)^{[src 10]}
The cloak cannot end in a trailing /^{[src 11]}

We don't allow multi-part cloaks (wikipedia/role/user or wikipedia/user/extra) unless it's a bot cloak (wikipedia/user/bot/botname or wikipedia/bot/botname).

This boils down to the following requirements that we as a project care about:

Cloaks cannot be longer than 63 characters, including the project prefix
The character after the / cannot be a digit.
The cloak can only contain characters a–z, A–Z, 0–9 and the hyphen (-)

Our project prefix is around 10-12 characters (commons is 18!), so this leaves usernames of about 50 characters.

Footnotes

^ This is a concern for staff, not GCs

Source code references

[1] This is a concern for staff, not GCs

[2] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/libathemecore/services.c#L1236-L1239

[3] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/libathemecore/services.c#LL1238C25-L1238C54

[4] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/modules/protocol/solanum.c#L91-L92

[5] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/libathemecore/services.c#L1239

[6] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/libathemecore/function.c#L482-L493

[7] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/modules/protocol/solanum.c#L107

[8] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/libathemecore/services.c#L1244

[9] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/include/atheme/constants.h#L49

[10] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/libathemecore/services.c#L1249-L1254

[11] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/modules/protocol/solanum.c#L94-L101

[12] ttps://github.com/atheme/atheme/blob/master/modules/protocol/solanum.c#L103-L105

[note 1]

[src 1]

[src 2]

[src 3]

[src 4]

[src 5]

[src 6]

[src 7]

[src 8]

[src 9]

[src 10]

[src 11]