Why do all old accounts have -******- around name?

Been using advanced search for a majority of my attacks this Halloweek, and noticed something strange. Almost all the old accounts have - - surrounding their names, take a look. Load image

Its not always one - - either, sometimes they have a few around their name. Just wondering why this is, and why the newer accounts don't have it. Thanks

The following answer uses AI, hope you don't mind.

The list of names are sorted by ASCII values, not alphabetically in the traditional sense.

In ASCII, the characters used in player names have the following order (from smallest to largest value):

- : 45
0–9 : 48–57
A–Z : 65–90
_ : 95
a–z : 97–122 

That means names starting with a dash (-) will appear before names that start with numbers or letters when sorted by ASCII order.

I thought it was a way to circumvent having the same name as someone else

but surely it wouldn't be ALL of them...

It sorts them by name.

The - comes before the letter A in the search results. 

As for your search results only turning up search results from older players. That would be down to your filters that you've used. For instance. Here's an account with - -  before and after and is less than 30 days old: https://www.torn.com/profiles.php?XID=3962971

Thank you, it makes sense now. I had it set to old acc on purpose

I remember having dashes next to your name was cool once upon a time, same as putting xxXBritishBenjiXxx

Also cheap and easy way of having a name that's technically already taken

(Looking at you -Beesus- [1959482], despite you having a Torn account first)

But yeah, it seems like all of them just because it's first alphabetically, like everyone else is saying

And in games where you can also use a space, using them as "frames" was a thing too... -=[ Indy Cision ]=-