users with . in their names

Originally Posted by Brian Cummiskey

Your only other option is to re-name the users so they don't have special characters in their names.

I have 500 users just with a hyphen in!

I'll block future ones - but am I just stuck with existing ones and their links?

What would be nice is a script that can find all existing problem pairs (like User Name and User-Name or User_Name) so I can change those. The set the regexp to prevent future problems.

You can run a simple query in phpmyadmin/etc

select userid, username from users where username like '%-%'

1. Manually set VBSEO_REWRITE_MEMBER_MORECHARS=1 options in the config_vbseo.php file to include "special" characters in URLs
(in 3.5.x+, this has moved into the CP at general settings -> character replacement -> Advanced Settings tab)

I wish there were even more granular control of this. It was pointed out today that there was a problem with one of my member's profile page with two . (periods) in their username where their member page was getting a url rewrite that showed another user's member page incorrectly. However, I could only find this one username where this problem existed. Is there any way to allow only the . as a special character but not make any other changes to the way vbseo is currently rewriting the member urls (e.g. if I choose the option to allow (all) special characters in the member url under advanced, all the existing - change to + which I don't want to do since those are already indexed. If I could have the granular control to just allow the . as a special character it would only change a handful of member urls vs. having to change thousands which are already indexed if my only option is to allow all special characters in member urls)

You can replace it with anything, but then THAT replacement may conflict as well.

ie, if you change

name.pair
to
name-pair

user name*pair will also be re-written to name-pair and will conflict.

Ultimately, the ideal solution is that if you allow more than just plain text a-z,0-9 in your members registration, you should include ID numbers in the member urls.