Help with usernames, PCRE-type regular expressions

[kpmedia]

Solution found.
I chronicled what did/didn't work here: Prevent stupid ASCII usernames in vBulletin
Hope that helps somebody, -KP


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Need a little help here. I can see this, but it's either too much or not enough:

You may require the username to match a PCRE-type regular expression.
(Do not start or end the expression with an escape character)
Examples:
^[A-Z]+$ - Characters from A-Z only
^[A-Z ]+$ - Characters from A-Z including space
^[A-Z0-9 ]+$ - Alphanumeric characters including space
^((?!&#\d+;)[\x20-\x7E])+$ - ASCII characters from 32-127
See PHP.net for more information on regular expressions.

I want A-Z, 0-9, periods, underscore, spaces and hyphens --- and that's it. Any help on what this would be?

And if you know how...
Preferably no "repeat" periods/underscore/hyphen/spaces. i.e., "--BESTUSEREVER-- ___ -- 123" Better yet, limit to two total periods, underscores, hyphens, spaces I don't want any more users trying to use screwball usernames full of ASCII. Or even overusing what is allowable non-letter/non-number.

Thanks.

[kpmedia]

EDIT: Solution found. See first post.

[mschmid]

Solution found.
I chronicled what did/didn't work here: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/show...scii-2823.html

Thank you very much, this helped. Forbidding for example "@" as username (in the Illegal User Name field) will also prevent someone to register with a (dodgy) email address as username.

[eJM]

Andrés (vBSEO.com) had a working answer, but he forgot to include the $ at the end. I'm using it without the underscore and it works just fine.

Jim

[kpmedia]

Thank you very much, this helped. Forbidding for example "@" as username (in the Illegal User Name field) will also prevent someone to register with a (dodgy) email address as username.

Hey, thanks for posting a reply, and letting me know it helped you.

Do notice that I had already included the @ symbol, because I don't consider email addresses to be a "username" either. As you mentioned, it's often dodgy. In other cases, it's just naive actions, and will lead to somebody getting their address harvested. And that's no good. (Tip: Use htaccess or web.config to block known harvester IP/bots.)

@eJM, I could never get vBSEO.com advice to work. To hazard a guess, it could be some bug specific to the exact combo of vB + vBSEO where it was attempted. Noting that I did get it to function at another forum on a different exact version.

Glad that I could help somebody, and give back to vB.com.

[eJM]

@eJM, I could never get vBSEO.com advice to work.

As I said, it was prob'ly the missing $ sign. If you have vBulletin forum 3.8.x, that expression does work. It just has to be complete:

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

By the way, your website has one of those stupid warnings that my browser is out of date. They don't work and it's irritating. I have the latest version of IE9 and it's telling me to upgrade to IE8??? Yeah, RIGHT!