Changing Member URLs

Hi guys - so far info here is good. Had one more question -

Many are saying that it is not a good idea to have text only in URLS and you should have numbers. I can deal with that for threads but not for members. Who wants to have a user name like johnnyblue-3442234?? Very bad.

I see you guys do it here. Some people say that it can cause problems with user names. But the user names are all unique so I don't understand why it is a problem. Also a question of special characters which I wouldnt use on my forums anyways.

Could you guys explain more about this? Thanks.

If you allow special characters in member names, there may be some conflicts.

see: users with . in their names - vBulletin SEO Forums
for your two options

Thanks. Your'e quick. I can't see the answer because it's in customer forums.

Can I turn off allowing special characters in member names? I am happy to do so. My users dont need it.

IN addition, can I locate user names with special characters and turn them off?

You can use a regular expression in your vb options -> user registration options, but this only will effect NEW registrations. It is not retro-active. If you have even ONE bad username, you should use IDs. Otherwise, you should rename the old bad usernames and disallow it in the future.

Code:

^[a-zA-Z0-9\s]+$

will only allow letters numbers and spaces.