My friends username has a dash before, after it or both and I cannot access their page. Why is this?

This is normal as they're not standard host naming (aka considered illegal char naming). In IE such usually works, however not in Firefox or on Linux.

To stop this we no longer allow such naming of accounts.

If you have an account with such, you may wish to create a new username.



Workaround:

This workaround has been successfully tested on SuSE Linux 10.3

You will need to add a line to your /etc/hosts file, with deviantART's dotted-quad address and .deviantart.com as the symbolic name, for instance:

198.172.81.21 -electra-.deviantart.com

(If you have several dA friends with usernames beginning or ending in a dash, you'll need such a line for each of them, with the same numeric address 198.172.81.21). Of course, any such line will have to be changed if the dA site changes its IP address someday.

Possible ways to determine dA's IP address is by looking at the heading line of the output of
- Windows: tracert www.deviantart.com
- Linux: traceroute www.deviantart.com


Note: Editing /etc/hosts usually requires superuser privileges. If you don't have them, you will probably need help from a sysadmin (of your system, not a dA admin).

Workaround provided by ~tonymec

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