"The username violates our guidelines"

I'm a Canadian, using my real name. It's not working either. I think it's just a bug and Microsoft could care less.

I fixed my issue by installing the Microsoft Start News App on my Android phone (Microsoft Start: News & more - Apps on Google Play).

I started the process using the Microsoft Start home page (first appears when you open MS Edge) on the MS Edge browser on Mac (Big Sur). When I was configuring MS Start, it is then I ran up against the "...username violates out guidelines," issue when signing up for the Community section. The username line in the 'sign up' dialog was EMPTY. I went through the normal motions and changed my Full Name under the "Your Info" section of my MS account, but nothing worked. No matter what I did, while using MS Start home page (or website) in the browser on my Mac, the username was always empty when trying to sign up for the Community section. I believe the empty username is a data fetch error. Furthermore, since the username line is empty in the Community sign up dialog box, it violates user guidelines of having a blank username. So, it is not a conspiracy but a programming issue (or maybe a browser specific issue not caught in testing).

[snip]

Unfortunately, MS Rewards is only available in a select few countries. If you're not from these countries you have no way to fix this issue.

No, this is not related to any "discrimination." Don't believe everything you hear either. Innocent comments do NOT get deleted. But often there are so many thousands of comments that once you comment your comment is lost in the thousands of other comments so you won't easily find it! There is no type of systemic reviews of comments, nobody has the resources to moderate all those comments. There is no systemic censorship going on, just paranoia of censorship!

Yes as we have been saying, it's some software bug regarding old accounts. Nothing on purpose or anything.

Same thing here, I highly doubt I offended anyone with my msn account, I can't even remember posting a comment. Maybe in the eighties or nineties