"The username violates our guidelines"

Yeah very funny, but remember, this is a free service and nobody really needs to post comments, there are plenty of silly comments already and nobody can read them all! So just save your time and don't worry about it. If you want to post so badly, create a new account. Obviously you were able to type your rant above, so no, there is no issue with posting comments on the internet. Regarding your sentence about "freedom of free expression" well nobody has guaranteed anyone the "right" to publish their opinions for free to the whole world, obviously whatever you type online can only reach a few people since it's obscured by many other outlets and millions of other comments. It's pure fantasy!

You are ridiculous, you're trying to take a technical issue (Username is BLANK due to some bug retrieving the name from the older system it seems) and you're making it into some silly political situation, one that doesn't exist! Nobody is "discriminating" against anybody, it's your imagination!

As many have pointed out in this chain of communication, it seems as if when signing up for Community using certain avenues the username is blank. A blank username violates the user guidelines.

It would be good if you could show a screenshot of the sign up portion of the community join process.

Sort of like this one...

Here, you can see that the username line is actually blank. This is what seems to be happening to most people.

Please post back when you can check to see if this is what is happening to you.

Thanks

im having the same issue. my name is "Julian Barber" i dont understand. it honestly seems like youre just trying to keep people from commenting randomly

edit: realized my name in this comunity fourm was different, and the word "dead" in it, tried changing it, cleared cookies/all history and other data, signed back in, still violates.

i think microsoft is just silencing us.

I totally understand what you are saying. I only mentioned possible censorship because it is an actual (read: real) and ongoing issue among many mainstream forums and websites. Regardless of what some might say something that is proven fact is not a conspiracy theory. I brought it up because I felt there was a chance it was part of what was going on here. It was some other guy who then took that as an attack on them personally and gave the typical troll response.

Regardless, I still haven't found a solution and have given up on Microsoft's news aggregation feature. Way too many options out there to have to deal with this (and also the Microsoft fanboy trolls...who knew?).