Verifying Avatar Names

[Neva Cross]

There are a number of functions that would be great to have that are not available through the gateway. One of the most useful functions would be converting avatar names to the user id number. We have asked the IMVU programmers about such a function and not received any response.

Someone asked us for code to verify the avatar name or the gift recipient name. Rather than trying to give a code snipit that may or may not make sense out of context with our code, I am going to ask Driggger to outline the process as this is one of the areas/functions I didn't design.

I am a firm believer in saying, "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime"

Yoo-hoo , Lynn where are you...???
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Neva Cross
Cross Design Group LLC
Harris Bank Building
800 E. Northwest highway, 7th Fl
Palatine, IL 60074
www.NevaCross.com

[Driggger]

Right now, we verify the avatar name by issuing the gateway's checkNameAvailability function. If the name is not available, we assume that it must be taken and, hence, valid.

This is not optimum. I believe that the function might return "not available" if you gave it an avatar name with invalid syntax (too long, invalid characters, etc.) I plan to improve upon this in a couple of ways. The short term answer is to figure out the syntax rules for avatar names, and pre-edit the name before doing the gateway call. This would be a lot better, though we could still have problems if, for example, the gateway was checking for obscene words as avatar names, or something like that, basically anything that would cause the gateway to say a name was not available for a reason other than someone already having it.

The longer term solution is to retrieve the user number for the avatar name. It it has a user number, we can be pretty sure it is a real avatar name. There does not appear to currently be a gateway call that will convert avatar name to user number, so this will take a little work.

And, of course, even when we verify that they entered a valid avatar name, we still have no way of knowing for sure that they entered the right one, especially since they may be buying products as a gift. But without adding mind-reading code to the store, there is only so much we can do.

lynn

[Holydust]

IMVU needs to recognize what a vital asset we are and get on the ball with helping us out. WE ARE THE FUTURE, DAMNIT.

proud to be in CDG,
HD