I think the problem is the too-long usernames, not this issue. I checked, it's actually a 255 character limit, not 255 bytes. Limit it to 2^6 chars?

conrad.irwin wrote:

What did you look at to work that out?

I tried to create the page æ * 130 on Wikipedia, and that was a no-go (though æ * 120 is fine). [See also the comment on line 2535 of Title.php]. A byte limit makes most sense as that's what mysql enforces within a VARBINARY(255).

conrad.irwin wrote:

r65101

Uh, sorry, you're right. It's 255 byte, not characters. The fix looks fine, as long as we don't have real long skin names ("monobook" (8 chars) to "vector" (6 chars) has been an improvement ;))