[mod]

To keep username from ruining the front-end.

If I had a 2,000 character username, this page would look really stupid.

[ChrisGranger]

I saw an example of that on a JavaScript-related site recently, where a guy's username was aaa...aaa several hundred characters long, causing a ludicrous horizontal scroll bar. You'd think it would be easy enough to say upfront during account creation that both usernames and passwords are limited to x characters.

[mike-cardwell]

That is what this css is for:

  overflow:      hidden;
  text-overflow: ellipsis;