Can profile name suggestions be case-insensitive?

Question

I know usernames are case sensitive, but the drop down that suggests usernames which match the input should be case-insensitive, as you often don't know the casing of a user.

Comments

I agree, as it is hassle to find out if you don't know.

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The suggestion are case insensitive. I get your correct if i type derlakaim
But the lookahed looks like it is only 1 character.
I would be nice to change it so looks at longer name if shorter names dont fill up all 8 suggestions

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It is not fully case-insensitive: when you type "Kisi" you don't get the suggestion "kisi".

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+1

This would be useful in all places where there is a search field for usernames. I don't suppuse that geocaching.com would allow two different profiles to exist that just differ in case. Thus making the search field case sensitive just becomes a (somewhat annoying) test as to whether you can remember which letters in your friends' names are capital and which are not.

Answer 1

The PGC suggestion list is case-insensitive for your friends, and case sensitive for all others.

The problem with making it case-insensitive is much bigger than you might think - geocaching is a multi-language game now. Should "C" match for all of these: cçćĉċčƈȼɔΓγ ? Does French consider c and ç to be the same letter? Some non-Latin alphabets also has upper and lower case forms, I think Arabic is one of these. What about numbers? Should "5" match for "V" and "five"? Or the sino-Japanese equivilent?

I guess it is just a big lookup table, but I am not sure that such a table already exists.

Geocaching.com is also case sensitive - "Dave" is a different name from "dave"

Comments

This is one way of looking at it. The other way is: the large majority even of non-english-speaking users have user names based on the ASCII set, where casing is very well defined. It is even implemented for the friends as you mention, so why not just implement it in the same way for all users?
Also, you deliver another argument: if you try to find a user that has a user name which differs only in casing from another this is the only way to realise that  these similar user names both exist.
Even better if this can be extended to similar looking non-ASCII characters, but this is another story - unlike domain names where this has been used I doubt this is an issue in geocaching yet (see http://www.unicode.org/Public/security/latest/confusables.txt)

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Luckily these lookup tables exist and are part of standard UTF libraries as it is a very common operation, and means linguists have been the ones to decide which characters are sufficiently equivalent for a case insensitive comparison. As long as the names are presented in the original case/letters it isn't a problem if the matching is generous and additional accented characters are included - the user can apply their brain to select the one they are looking for.

Answer 2

it is not case insensitive

Comments

Correct, it is not. The post is a request that it be made case insensitive.