nickname symbol

[Никита Шашлык]

Up until one point I was using a symbol in the nickname that carries "Other usernames:" up to your nickname in the steam profile.

Does anyone know what that cool symbol is? It even broke chat rooms in some games, for example:

When I wrote something in Deep Rock Galactic chat, all my messages were before my nickname.

Case in point:

This is what a normal message looks like -- nickname: hello chat!

As it was with this symbol -- hello chat! nickname:

[Kargor]

It's possible that Unicode bidirectional writing was abused for stuff like this.

As an example, follow these steps exactly:

• copy the character "ר" (that's a Hebrew character, btw.). Just the character, not the quotes.
  
• paste it into an empty Steam forum text entry box
  
• note how the cursor ends up to the left of this character
  
• hit the "cursor right" key once to move to the right of the character
  
• type something in normal letters

You'll notice that even though you've not moved the cursor back, your additional text will appear before that character. In fact, you can even use the mouse to click beyond the end of line, to move the cursor after that Hebrew character, and additional typing will still end up before it again.

You'll also notice that editing this stuff seems to behave weird -- that's until you understand that the Hebrew character is actually the first character in the line, and the others are to the right of it, from the perspective of how the Steam forum and the text editor sees it. It's just the display that's different.

This is because of how Unicode bidirectional writing works. If something doesn't properly reset things between chunks of text that are meant to be in fixed positions relative to each other without taking writing direction into account -- and, I'll admit, few software including my own, takes this into account -- you might be able to achieve the effect you've observed.

Of course, this is not specific to this character, or Hebrew characters -- anything that writes from right to left should cause this to happen.

There are also "invisible" characters that set the writing direction, but I haven't tried to play around with these since they are "difficult" to copy-paste around...

[Никита Шашлык]

My symbol was exactly invisible, except I can't remember who I got it from.