Forum:Potential image policy change

I've been thinking for a while now about a way to change the image policy such that card names no longer have to have a bunch of different characters stripped (save for technical considerations, e.g. #), while keeping the current ability to automatically and with complete accuracy break the image names down into their separate parts/tags. This would have a number of benefits, not least of which is no longer requiring uploaders to remember a laundry list of characters that must be removed from card names when naming files, and not requiring the card's name to be specified in every single instance of templates designed to handle the image names. This would result in image names along the lines of e.g.  (where the "%" is just being used as a standin for whatever separator ultimately gets used).

The biggest obstacle to this, however, has been finding a new separator which isn't used in any card name, and is highly unlikely to be used in any future card name - in any language, preferably - and, in addition, the separator needs to be relatively simple to type from most standard keyboard layouts. Needless to say, this is a pretty tall order, and has stymied me for several months. Thanks to this list, though, I was able to search through the entire (I think) list of English card names without fooling with SMW queries or the like, and come up with a potential list of suitable characters:  Another possibility is doubling the currently-used hyphen-minus (-), which has the advantage of not being a huge departure from current practice. I personally favor the \, followed closely by -- and * (in no particular order), but want to hear others' thoughts.

Some things to keep in mind with the above suggestions:

So, with all that in mind, I want to hear comments and alternate suggestions from others (particularly those that are familiar with non-US-QWERTY keyboards, and those that do a lot of image uploading/renaming work) for the character to use (and as always with these sorts of discussions, I'm also open to suggestions for changing/improving the image policy in general). This is the final major revision to image naming I want to do in the near-to-mid future (it should be usable for at least the next five-to-ten years with only minor tweaks), so the closer to ideal we can get it before setting it in stone and deploying, the better. 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 10:40, September 26, 2012 (UTC)