The deal is that in the last 2 weeks and the first 2 weeks of a year there is no such thing as "normal service".
As soon as "normal service" resumes and Gameforge is no longer on a skeleton crew because people oddly enough want to have vacation over the holiday season, this can be tackled again
I saw the updated format today. Thank you and the dev team as well for the handling of this situation 
IMO asking some broader audience should be final. Why bother posting an option that is unfeasible anyway?
I hope the UI change will be seriously considered. The building UI is a no brainer, plenty of room for numbers. As foir the resource UI, there's some space below, so some sort of 2+3 could fit nicely.
Because different options take different amounts of work, or perhaps are not fully investigated as to whether it's really feasible or not. If one option takes a lot more work (and time), then it might be a good idea to gather some data to find out if people really want that, then it might be worth taking a more serious look at it. It might still turn out to be infeasible in the end but at least you can know if people even want it to begin with, otherwise it's a waste of time. It's just a simple matter of being responsible with resources.
"None of this is binding and final" - this right here pretty much means "we pretend to care about your opinion, for the sake of PR, but in the end we'll do what we decide". Add to that the fact that the leading option (and with quite a lead at that) is probably the one they'd want the least and voilà
Of course, they can and ultimately will decide whatever they want, since they are the ones that will be doing the work of implementing it. But they've decided it will be a good idea to gather information on the community's opinions, which is a good thing. They will weigh the results against how feasible each option is and factor it into the decision. This is all pretty obvious. Astonishing that you can see gathering opinions for informational purposes as a negative thing.
Quite the opposite I would say, in pure mathematics everyone pretty much universally avoid using any kind of "large number prefix letters" from what I've seen, not even standard SI prefixes (k, M, G) because letters are already used to represent variables. Closest you might see is someone writing 5.0e6 or something instead of 5.0 × 10⁶ when typing just because there's no exponents on the keyboard. Maybe in some certain specializations or regions kkkk is used, but it's far from "universal".
I saw your link, I just think it's a long way off from something I'd call "universal". Like I said, never heard of it before in my life.
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but ..... please , you can't say it's better now than before !!!
There are gazillions of games using similar notations. There are many games, some of us even ours (Metin2 for example comes to mind), where players themselves count in k, kk, kkk in the markets when trading items etc. k, kk, kkk is not exactly unknown to gamers in general, albeit obviously unusual and unknown to Ikariam players.
With constantly growing numbers in Ikariam a change to a different numeral notation and handling was ultimately necessary. Many games solve too high number growth with a number squish, but somehow I think, Ikariam players wouldn't love the idea much of their 5.000.000 gold suddenly becoming 500 gold (prices would of course also shrink, every number would simply be squished).
k, kk, kkk is a mathematical notation that's universally known and used in maths etc., so that also doesn't change with localization, which is another problem that existed. Turkish for example had an expression for million that was, for some reason, even longer than the word million. In the US, a billion is something different than in the EU. There are many, many good reasons not to use words but simple units that are universally the same.
Sure, we could have also used exponential notation, then 1.000.000 would have been 1x106. The fact remains: with the ever growing numbers in Ikariam, this needed shortening AND a universal notation that doesn't change with language.
As always: we'll gather feedback and see what happens. I am not going to go into panic mode after not even a full 24 hours of the thing being live and in total not even 50 unique users mentioning dislike. We don't make decisions based on panic mode, we gather feedback, evaluate and then work with a more rounded foundation of feedback.
As a person who plays video games and has studied mathematics at fairly high levels, I've never seen this notation in my life. So I don't know about "universally known and used in mathematics". Quite the opposite I would say, in pure mathematics everyone pretty much universally avoid using any kind of "large number prefix letters" from what I've seen, not even standard SI prefixes (k, M, G) because letters are already used to represent variables. Closest you might see is someone writing 5.0e6 or something instead of 5.0 × 10⁶ when typing just because there's no exponents on the keyboard. Maybe in some certain specializations or regions kkkk is used, but it's far from "universal".
Likewise having played a lot of games and never seen it before... I haven't played every game in the world of course but I'm not very convinced it's as common as you make it sound.
I find this update very bizarre and I disapprove of it (just adding my voice to the pile, since you're in the "gathering feedback" stage). If something were to be done, I would have expected standard SI prefixes (k, M, G) would be the obvious choice. It should be understood by almost everyone, certainly more people than would understand kkk I'm quite sure. And they are (generally) independent of locale.
Is it really so difficult to get a text box to accept ASCII characters?
Yes, it is - if we want to not allow to enter some crazy random special characters that can cause other issues.
Considering that it used to work, and there are other text boxes in the game like the alliance page that work with it just fine, I'm really not buying it 
So, after 2 years, the "fix" was.... to embrace the bug and change the error message to say "that's officially the way it's supposed to be now".
Is it really so difficult to get a text box to accept ASCII characters?
How can someone think that two different buildings - the Palace and Governor's Residence - could be the same building?
I don't think he thought they were the same building. I think he assumed the Palace and Governor's Residence would be interchangeable for the purpose of fulfilling the requirements for the dockyard. At least that's my interpretation based on his statement:
I assumed Palace would be interchangeable with the GR in this
As to the impending follow-up questions of "why would you make an assumption like that? The description doesn't say Palace, it says Governor's Residence, and it means exactly what it says and not one word extra, I can't see any possible reason why anyone would assume that it means more than exactly what it says", well I can't answer for him, but I can at least give my own opinion.
I can see why one would assume that the description saying "Governor's Residence" was supposed to mean "Governor's Residence or Palace" and that the person who wrote the description just forgot to include Palace. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Mainly because, there is seemingly no obvious reason to exclude the Palace, whereas making a typo is a fairly easy to mistake to imagine (I recall we used to have a whole category for "text issues" where random phrases and interfaces would be untranslated from German). So then it's just a question of "is it more likely that the game developers intentionally excluded the Palace for no apparent reason, or that they just forgot to include it in the description?" The second seems much more likely, so I can see why someone would assume it was so.
I also think it's quite normal that people consider the Palace and Governor's Residence as being interchangeable. They are for most intents and purposes the same building. They are unlocked at the same time, perform the same function in the town, they have identical building cost and building time. They also open up the same "Towns in your empire" interface when clicked on; the only difference is the Palace has the extra button for changing form of government.
And, what's this? That's interesting, it says "Palace" for the whole column, but we know only one of them is a Palace and the rest are GRs.
That's funny. It seems even Gameforge considers them to be basically interchangeable. Actually it's an example of this exact assumption in action. The literal text just says "Palace" and nothing else, but it actually means "Palace or Governor's Residence" in reality. So, I can definitely see why some people would think that the Dockyard requirement includes Palaces even though the description doesn't mention it specifically. I don't think it's strange at all.
Personally I think the Palace should also count, I really don't see any reason why it should be excluded. But if not, then I think the description should be changed to add "A Palace does not fulfill this requirement at the end." to remove all possibility of confusion.
It appears that the error occurs if the message contains anything other than letters, numbers, and spaces. If there is any punctuation, it fails, but if it's only letters and numbers I'm able to save.
