what restrictions are available in nickname/usernames when registering?

[TheBear]

Hello,

Just wondering what restrictions are available for the admin to set in regards to nicknames/username (not sure the proper term) for registering users?

I ask as I will be integrating vBulletin into my site and one feature I offer users is an email account as well at one of my domains.

It seems that vBulletin allows for spaces in a username where as of course email addresses do not allow that. I was thinking of making the email address the same as the username - which would of course require strict naming conventions.

Thanks for any info on this.

Dale

[Floris]

Not sure .. but

As an Administrator you can login to the Admin Control Panel where there is this option available :

Illegal user names

Enter names in here that you do not want people to register. If any of the names here are included within the username, the user will told that there is an error. Separate names by spaces.



Maybe this means you can include ^ and & and % and $ ..

Not really sure, but that is what I understand of it. (getting the space will be a bit tricky)


Another few options you got are the following :

Minimum Username Length
Enter the minimum length a user can register with.

Maximum Username Length
Enter the maximum length a user can register with.


This way if your E-mail can't be longer then 8 or 10 characters, you can say: min: 3 max: 8

And ofcourse, you can just request the users to not use any spaces or weird characters (by altering a registration _ template)


Oh,

Another option :

Moderate New Members
Allows you to validate new members before they are classified as registered members and are allowed to post.


This way you can reply to their E-mail address, sorry, your username isn't legal. Please try to register with : (nomal one) and those who are good, just validate them.



Anway, hope this helps

[TheBear]

xiphoid,

Thanks for the reply. Last night after posting that, I had a discussion with a number of my users and decided that they like to use unique/interesting names that may need to include spaces or other charactors, so I decided that for the email account they get, they can specifiy a different name which will have to conform to the specs. This also actually helps to protect their privacy a bit more as the other users will not then automatically know their email address (I hide all email addresses on my site).

Thanks again, can't wait to get my new servers online so I can buy this and start working on it.

Dale

[Floris]

np

No Problem, and enjoy.
You can request them to enter the alternative name in a extra-user-field which you can add through the admin control panel. That way you can maybe use a script to grep the info and auto generate mail-accounts with that.