Punctuation breaks "Member Profile" links

[Dan.]

Although I suspect this may be a "Tough Luck" type issue, I've noticed that over the years PC and vBulletin in general seems to croak whenever a username is terminated with punctuation. Where this shows up is on the "View Public Profile" link. vBulletin with change the final character "punctuation" to a "-" character when parsing the user URL. This works with mixed results.

I know that username "Cheap!" used to go off into the weeds so whenver I wanted to browse his profile, I would change the last 6 characters of the URL from "-.html" to "!.html" and all would be well.

Now it seems my Public Profile is now unaccessible. Now the problem is that vBulletin gets confused between user "dan" and user "Dan." If you try to view my public profile (DanDot) you will end up at dan's profile (DanNoDot). To fix this, you simply change the last 6 characters of the URL (manually) from "-.html" to "..html"

Since my profile is already established and I don't feel like porting it to a new profile, I guess I'm just stuck with it, but if any admins feel adventurous, it would be neat to have the "View Public Profile" work for us few members that punctuated our handle.

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[Danny]

Hmm... for fun I just tried adding a custom redirect in htaccess but I can't seem to get it to work. I'm going to post over on the vBSEO forum to see if they can help.

[Dan.]

Originally Posted by Danny

Hmm... for fun I just tried adding a custom redirect in htaccess but I can't seem to get it to work. I'm going to post over on the vBSEO forum to see if they can help.

Wow! Hey thanks for the cycles on this.

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[daniel]

My suggestion would have been to treat punctuated (and capitalized) user names as identical to their non-punctuated (or all-lower-case) versions. Thus, if there was already a user "Dan" then "Dan." would not be allowed. Similarly, "danny" would not be allowed, as there's already a "Danny," and "Daniel" would not be allowed since there's already a "daniel" (me). And if a user has registered as "Cheap!" then nobody else could register as "Cheap" or "cheap!" or "cheap".

Another obvious possibility would be to disallow punctuation in user names at all. Permit upper case, but resolve all letters to lower case when determining if a user name already exists.

The reason I suggest this is to avoid the obvious confusion. People seeing a post from "Dan." might well confuse the poster with the user "Dan" if these are two separate people. Similarly with the cap and non-cap variants of the same name. Without such a restriction, a malicious poster could intentionally register a user name too much like an existing name, copy and use the same avatar, and libel that person by posting comments that defame his/her character.

Note that on many web sites, upper and lower case are interchangeable in user names, even though they are distinct in passwords.

[TheForce]

Dan I was about to report this a while back because I wanted to look at your profile but I forgot all about it. I just remove the - and added the . in your profile link to get access.

May I ask why you have a . in your username? Just causing trouble like Bobby Tables? xkcd - A Webcomic - Exploits of a Mom

[Dan.]

Originally Posted by TheForce

Dan I was about to report this a while back because I wanted to look at your profile but I forgot all about it. I just remove the - and added the . in your profile link to get access.

May I ask why you have a . in your username? Just causing trouble like Bobby Tables? xkcd - A Webcomic - Exploits of a Mom

Well my profile try handle list has always been:

"Dan"
"Dan."
".Dan."
"d4n"
"d4n13"
"Dan1011"

I'm not a very creative fellow, so I figure my parents did all the work of naming me Dan, I might as well use it as much as possible. If punctuation was disallowed when I registered, I would have settled on d4n, but I think the horse has left the barn at this point.

I know other vb forums handle it. EcoModder has a "Dan" and "Dan." The links resolve without issue as:

Fuel Economy, Hypermiling, EcoModding News and Forum - EcoModder.com - View Profile: DAN
Fuel Economy, Hypermiling, EcoModding News and Forum - EcoModder.com - View Profile: Dan.

PC just seems special in this regard.

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