How does Yahoo! Answers' nickname truncation system work, and why is it so configured?

I'm confused about Yahoo! Answers' nickname truncation system.

I know that there's a nickname truncation system because if I use as a nickname my ordinary pseudonym, "Nihiltres", it is annoyingly truncated and replaced with "Nihiltre..."

As someone who's experimented a little with web design, I can appreciate the idea of a system that would impose width restrictions—with a narrow space for avatars, long names are difficult to format nicely. It's somewhat silly in my case, because the "..." is longer in both number of characters (they should use the ellipsis character "…" and not 3 periods "...") and in literal width ("..." is wider than "s", for me at least). I can tolerate simple off-cases where there's an unfortunate strict limit.

I figured to myself that this was fair, and guessed that the system would cut off certain nicknames based on a character limit, except in some cases where it would use a few lines to display several short words. After all, if I were programming such a thing, I might find that a reasonable approach.

I noticed a few minutes ago, however, a nickname with a very long word and multiple words. Curious, I changed my nickname to the current one with two hair spaces as an extra "word" each, and suddenly my nickname appears in full and even, for me at least, on a single line.

Aside from the oddity in the effectiveness of my little hack, how does this work? What are the limits that cause the Yahoo! Answers software to truncate a nickname or not? Moreover, why is it configured in such a way that my hack is necessary for me to avoid truncation, while those with less reasonable nicknames have theirs displayed in full?