The most annoying Friends bug

The most annoying bug of Friends plugin (which generally speaking a great effort with quite promising features!) is the problem of non-standard display names threated as username. If some account, e. g. from Mastodon have display name have emojis as this one

DCoder 🇱🇹❤🇺🇦

Or wild combination of non-alphanumerics as this one:

D:\side\>:idle:

Or something else beyond latin alphanumerics, let it be Cyrillic letters in nickname, like this one:

РосКомСвобода

Even such innocent name like rogue_corq will result to the results describe below.

The result is awful – default behavior is to create virtual users with empty or non-usable usernames with e. g. -character. This makes such username and account unusable for links at Friends List left pane and they seems to break the Friends list (list of your friends page. The “break the page” means literal breaking of the page code at backend (an error email sent to me) and visual breaking of page markup with some broken div tag an and error message.

And as result you can’t rename or remove them to re-add them again later with better username. Single thing I can think about is to edit the database directly to fix such accounts.

Normally this should be a plugin issue report at GitHub for @alex-kirk , but I hope someone have a recipe, or plugin like “manual DB editing at admin UI” I could use right now?

I hope that eventually I will get used to this and will be able to fix broken data at my instance DB… And what is sad that I don’t have any PHP skills to apply a fix and write some test for it.