I've had to change a setting for those registering.
It was apparently possible that if someone registered an account with a username the same as someone else's but with just the addition of # or & then they could receive PMs intended for the original user.
As such, usernames can now only contain the letters A-Z (both upper and lower case), numbers and spaces. It's not possible to use any other character in your username... no dots, no quotes or apostrophes (sorry Irish people), no unicode.
What about _