I didn't do that.
I will try that after the next soft reset I do.
I've been using hyphens, &/ampersan, quotes, spaces, brackets. Didn't see any issues until this thread made note of it. Any names I've tried for devices or apps have always been accepted without any error message and haven't seemed to cause an issue so my assumption was HE escaped names properly. But you never know the internals...
Sometimes it feels like anything is worth a try with this hub. But I will await a full moon first I think before doing the barking like a dog so that when the neighbours ask I have a valid excuse.
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So can we use brackets etc??
Yeah, thus far they haven't caused any obvious issues (unless they"ve caused issues around the back in the database) . I've used device/app names like....
Angus' mobile
This & that!
Main Bedroom Light - 1
Device (1)
Etc. Spaces, hyphen, brackets, ampersand, apostrophes.
No errors specific to this per se.
But I do note the caution above regarding potential issues with SQL so I'm simplifying some of them. But to be honest I don't believe these are the cause of my issues.
Maybe we can have someone from Hubitat confirm these characters are OK.... @bobbyD?
In the past it has been clearly stated by the HE team that using "special characters" is discouraged. The platform tries to "catch" potential issues, but it's generally not good practice. This link is to an older post, so it may not be a relevant as it was in the past.
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It is always a good practice to avoid common characters used in coding such as:
$ # % {} * [] ~ & <>
While our developers make every effort to avoid these characters from breaking apps and drivers, not all of the cases may be avoidable, so we strongly encourage everyone to avoid them if at all possible in naming devices or app instances.
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You don't have to wait for the full moon. I think the 3 suggestions mentioned in your ticket will significantly improve your experience 
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You have mail. I think there is one issue we can try to resolve. The other 2 - if they are indeed causing issues - would reduce my satisfaction with the hub 
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After more than 25 years with Unix and Linux, I avoid using any special characters in naming including spaces, replacing them with underscores.
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Does speech notifications handle underscores ok?
Alexa would respond with something like "kitchen underscore dimmer" but I have her responses disabled, just the bong sound. If I were to ask, turn on the kitchen dimmer, she turns on the kitchen_dimmer. No need to use kitchen underscore dimmer.
The Alexa integration doesn't use the device label to match up to your device in Hubitat. The device label can change. I can't say with 100% certainty, but I assume that it uses the device ID the same way that the maker API and every other Hubitat app does. So, having anything in your device label would only make a difference when the device was discovered by Alexa. Not in subsequent commands back and forth. What if the device label changed in Hubitat? Alexa would no longer be able to control it? Well, since it can, we know that it is not based on device label.
While I agree using special characters should be avoided, the space is not a special character. And since the information passed back and forth from Alexa is in JSON format, a space will not make a difference. It's not like it's trying to URL encode the name or something. If it's in JSON, it won't matter.
So are brackets ( ) bad?
Brackets are a "special character" and as stated above should be avoided.
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So what I've learned thus far (re-inforcing some things I've learned before from other's posts):
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HE staff seem to have access to logs that we do not. This has allowed Bobby to determine I have 2 "stranded" zigbee devices that are sending traffic and causing delays to my mesh However there is no way to determine what they are. No errors related to this have occurred in my logs as far as I can see.
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His access also allowed him to state that, yeah you've guessed it, the beta Chromecast app is at fault and throwing errors (even tho they are not visible on my logs over the last 2 days and yet my hub has still been slowing down). Seems this app which has been in beta for months gets a lot of blame for many hub slow down across many users but there is still no timeline to "allocate resources to this project" and moving it to a properly supported status. Strange priority setting in my opinion.
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my "Cloud Controller" is getting "stuck" through accessing dashboards via their cloud url. Dashboards have consistently become slow or often given a hub not accessible type of error. While I appreciate the use of local dashboards when at home, I think the Cloud service should work properly without getting stuck. I don't have any dashboards using "all devices" so we cannot lay the blame there.
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the normal approach of disabling all custom apps and Chromecast beta is recommended.
I won't be contacting support about hub slow downs again because in my opinion it's a waste of time. Last night I woke up to the lights on full in the bedroom at around 3.30 am, and found the hub rebooting itself and so unable to do anything whatsoever. This is a first. You can imagine the mouthful I got from my wife. Frankly I'm about done with this beta product. Stupidly, something keep bringing me back. Maybe it's the engineer in me, the occasional delight when (rarely) it works properly, the thousands of dollars invested in the IoT at my properties. But it really is a joke right now that I'm unable to smile at whatsoever.
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This has been going on for over a year now!!!!!!!!
Caused me mega issues which stopped when I disabled the app and all apps that referenced it.
Still no end in sight.
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Yeah.... I know it is "beta", but realistically if there are known issues with it they have a responsibility to fix it or pull it entirely. If they are working on it, they should say so (I don't remember anything about improvements in the release notes, although I didn't go search them while writing this post either).
I think that is the same thing they would tell the developer of a badly behaving user app as well... So I don't think I'm holding them to a higher standard (although we probably should. 
).
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I could not agree more. The silence is deafening around this app.
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I don't use the integration, so I'm not losing sleep over it personally. But still...
