special characters in member profiles problem

Ok here's the problem...

There's a user called Peoples and another user called -PEOPLES-. When I click on the nick's in Who's Online? it redirects to the profile of the first one for both users.

So vbseo removes the - on user -PEOPLES-. That's because I have set include special characters to 0 in config_vbseo.

So now you think: so set it to 1 and it will include the - right? Yes I could do that but then usernames with spaces in them are badly rewritten.

John W turns in to John%2BW or something.

So I think what I need is something that allow the use of certain characters and disallow others.

vB 3.6.x has a field in AdminCP where you can use RegEx to specify what characters are allowed in usernames. I have mine limited to letters, numbers, _ and .

Yep i know I've used that for new registrations but old ones are still using some of the forbidden chars. That's why I'm searching for a solution for them.

btw just noticed this is in the wrong forum.

Originally Posted by dutchbb

Ok here's the problem...

There's a user called Peoples and another user called -PEOPLES-. When I click on the nick's in Who's Online? it redirects to the profile of the first one for both users.

So vbseo removes the - on user -PEOPLES-. That's because I have set include special characters to 0 in config_vbseo.

So now you think: so set it to 1 and it will include the - right? Yes I could do that but then usernames with spaces in them are badly rewritten.

John W turns in to John%2BW or something.

So I think what I need is something that allow the use of certain characters and disallow others.

Yes exactly! I am having this same exact issue as well so is there a solution to this? I'm really hoping this can be fixed in the next release.

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

vBulletin 3.6.x has a field in AdminCP where you can use RegEx to specify what characters are allowed in usernames. I have mine limited to letters, numbers, _ and .

Oh really? I never knew about that. Think you could guide me please 'cause I'm not sure if I can see it.

Actually, I only allow letters, numbers, periods and dashes. It's under User Registration Options. This is the RegEx I use:

^[A-Z0-9-.]+$

Thanks. Still that doesn't solve the problem with dashes in similar usernames. A link to user -joe- will go to the profile of joe.

Yeah, you would have to disallow - also. Or include the userid in your profile URL.

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

Actually, I only allow letters, numbers, periods and dashes. It's under User Registration Options. This is the RegEx I use:

^[A-Z0-9-.]+$

Thanks, but what about hyphens and underscores? I would like to have that as well.

Originally Posted by Darkblade

Thanks, but what about hyphens and underscores? I would like to have that as well.

Help gives the following information

^[A-Z]+$ - Characters from A-Z only
^[A-Z ]+$ - Characters from A-Z including space
^[A-Z0-9 ]+$ - Alphanumeric characters including space
^[\x20-\x7E]+$ - ASCII characters from 32-127

See PHP.net for more information on regular expressions.

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

Yeah, you would have to disallow - also. Or include the userid in your profile URL.

With the RegEx you are using, spaces in names are also not allowed right? In that case one could allow for special chars in the vbseo config and replace spaces in existing usernames with dashes. That solves the problem. Now to find a query that can automatically find spaces in 30.000 usernames and replace them with dashes...

[edit] Well I think your idea is better, just not allowing dashes in usernames, and replacing the ones that already exist with underscores.

Originally Posted by keith

Is there any other information about this? I have a ton of users with japanese characters and other special characters in their username. Quite honestly I don't want to enable the regex for usernames since then people won't be able to use Japanese names.

Info here: Member List