Special Characters and Vanity Member URLs

I've been able to strip away almost all the special characters from my users names. The only remaining ones are the blank space and underscore. I was wondering how VBSEO handles user names that have these characters and I was wondering what I might be able to do to be able to more quickly clean up the user names that would make the vanity member name urls possible - and without the unsightly numbers which don't make for good vanity urls. Would appreciate all thoughts and ideas.

PS - What I have noticed is that I can strip out the dash from the few user names that still have it and the spaces between names can use a dash instead of the space. My new registration system does not allow spaces for registration.

Both are converted to "-"

so,

_bill and *space*bill will both end up as "-bill/" for a url.

So essentially this still creates a problem. Hmmm.... I wonder how vbseo customers have been able to deal with this unless they locked off their forum from using any special characters from the outset. Why is it that I thought that there was usage of the underscore in a URL? I guess that comes from the misconception that one can use it in a URL, which I think converts to a dash.

Hmmm... this is going to be trouble. There is no way of being able to do a "find and replace" in vbulletin properly unfortunately. This is because records of the user name are all over the vB database, from my experience.

using the [user_id] variable solves the problem.

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

using the [user_id] variable solves the problem.

Understood, but this defeats the purpose of vanity urls. I'm working on finishing the conversion. It's been a ghastly time suck but we're close to cleaning the database...