Welcome our newest CT staff member (i.e., there’s a new sheriff in town)

Yeah, that hyphen in his username tripped me up for the longest time!

 

I've been signing posts with that hyphen as a habit for... a really long time.

What cemented it, though, was when the first Internet search engines appeared - and putting a hyphen ("minus sign") in front of a search term was how you asked for results that did not contain the term. That felt like a fun joke at the time.

Alas, while the official rules for email addresses do allow leading hyphens in usernames, hardly any mail servers or clients actually tolerate it. I think somewhere I have an extremely old email I managed to send with a username of "...---...". I was kinda proud of that one. But all my active email addresses and aliases these days start with a plain old letter.