I need to reserve usernames in my new website.
These generally fall into three categories
1) usernames no-one should have (eg: admin, user, service, help, root, etc)
2) names of super famous people or companies we may want to reserve in the event that they show up
3) other names specified by us directly.
It would be really helpful if some list of usernames for the first 2 categories existed somewhere and I could just use them.
Does anyone know of such a list?
Yes I have this list with more than 300 reserved usernames. I had to create the list because I am the webmaster of http://postbit.com/ (where users can choose any username as a subdomain (yourname.postbit.com) to create blog and photo albums. We created a list of reserved usernames and subdomains that can not be registered by others.
Here is our complete list of reserved names: http://blog.postbit.com/reserved-username-list.html
Before we had that list, one of the first users registered his username as "www", so he took our main domain and we had to remove his login and create this blacklist.
In the list there are default domain names (such as www, ftp, poop, smtp, ns..), some default unix usernames (root, webmaster, mysql, http, pop, postfix) and reserved words for internal use (devel, tests, scripts, support, search) and also reserved usernames for future use (mobile, downloads, music, games) and more.
A good way to find those standard usernames is by using word-lists designed for brute-force attacks. They may contain too many simple names but a simple search using your favorite search engine for a combination of "brute-force", "dictionary" and "wordlist" may bring up what you need. E.g. :
There are many of those lists, but no standard list.
This link from the Internet Archive contains a gzip compressed text file of word-lists from 2013.
If you're hoping to end up being vary large and want to reserve celebrity names (which, I personally think is reasonable from a future marketing standpoint) I would consider grabbing the top few hundred twitter handles from http://twitaholic.com/
