[spookthesunset]

For what it’s worth the “big” company I work for stores usernames in MySQL. 15 years ago when the username column was created it was set for ASCII (or whatever legacy charset it was). Changing it to utf8 would be a royal pain in the ass, requiring all kinds of testing and crazy updates across the entire company.

So while we’d love to make it utf8, it is just too much work to justify doing over other things.

[tsimionescu]

I should have noted - i was talking about their restrictions for passwords, not usernames. Since those are hashed before storage, i think there are far fewer excuses for such limitations.