I am relatively new to Lemmy, although I’ve had my account since before the current Reddit uprising and migration. I want to create a community for pen lovers, since that was one of my favorite subs over on Reddit and there’s not one here.
I was able to go to the main page on Lemmy.ml and choose to create a community. I put in the sidebar text, an icon, a banner, etc., and pressed “Create”, but I keep getting a popup telling me to “Match the requested format” over name at the top. I’ve tried “pens”, “!pens”, “c/pens”, “/c/pens”, and “https://lemmy.ml/c/pens”, and nothing seems to work. Any idea what it’s asking for?
(And yes, I did a Google search and fell down several rabbit holes, but came up empty for an answer.”
I used this as an excuse to start a community, just so I could try to reproduce your problem. But, it actually worked for me on the first try, simply by using a single word without any special characters. Similar to your “pens” attempt. FWIW the only other field I filled in was the Display Name, for which I used the same word but starting with a capital letter. For Languages, I selected English.