UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 6 V6 Modifications Archived Mods Change Username Hack

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In reply to:

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This hacks allows you to:

a) Change a username to something new

b) if the new username already exists, the script will merge the usernames.

All the settings from the old username will be kept - except for the total posts number, which will reflect the correct totals. The title doesn't get reset though, so you may need to modify it manually.

PMs sent and received, address book entries, moderators, subscriptions, read receipts etc etc are all handled and reflect the new username.

I built on Dave's great work - thanks!

Max

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I only changed a couple lines to get it to work. I also had to add in a section to change the "last post by" section, because it wasn't changing the name there.

Thank you very much. !!!!!

so this doesn't work under 6 final? I just tried it, the link shows up in the admin panel, but when you click it the right page is just a blank white page

Thank you.

Works just fine - will be very useful when I convert a forum from UBB to threads - I have extended it to my moderators, so that the workload of changing usernames is shared.

I realise it is a risk - but then I like to trust people.

Ian.

I'm sorry, it works for me. Are you sure the sk_changename.php file is in your ubbthreads/admin folder? That is the page that should be called up when you click the link.

Yes works just fine and so do signatures

sorry for my ignorance, I didn't see Lisa's new attachment, so I was using the old attachment

Works great on 6.0.1 !!

Thanks!

6.0.1 worked right out of the box; cant get a hack thats any easier to install!

Awesome hack. Works great... should be part of the official relase.

Here's a tip:
I had a user "bobbrown" who asked to change his username to "BobBrown" (note the capitols). Using the change for this actually deletes the user...... BUT

There is a work around....
Change "bobbrown" to "bobbrown2".. then change "bobbrown2" to "BobBrown" and it works fine.

Just a tip if anyone has this type of request.

Yep, I changed a user's name to have some caps, and they vanished later on. It did change them for a bit...

At least now I know to change them to something else first! LOL

Thanks for reporting that.

Maybe the hack should be revised to either deal with that case, or disallow it.

I had that too, changed a guy from barryrs4 to BarryRS4 and he was fine, then a few hours later he completely vanished from the database! his account and all his posts, the guy was really pissed as he had like 1500 posts and went down to newbie status!

Now we need a hack to backup all the deleeted users and their posts! ROFL

A hack from the admin menu that did a mysqldump would be a wonderful idea.... saving the last 5 backups or so.

[]Maybe the hack should be revised to either deal with that case, or disallow it.

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I already played with that but didn't complete it.
I simply convert the usernames to lowercase and do a comparison. You can simply skip the db-queries that are used for merging 2 users and cause the disapearing.

I can post the code, when i'm back home. But it isn't finished yet.

So in sk_dochangename.php, if strcasecmp($olduser,$newuser)==0, then you would do all the queries after the comment "go ahead and change the source username to the target username everywhere", but omit all the preceding queries?

I wonder if the eregi_replace() on line 201 should be changed to ereg_replace(). Maybe that doesn't matter.

I attached my modified version with the workaround for the upper and lower case problem. It should work but isn't fully tested. So you may want to backup your user before trying it. Let me know if any problems occur.

@Dave_L yes, that was the way i did it. Yes, ereg_replace would be better code. Also it doesn't matter here, because the usernames are case insensitive.

Thanks

A few issues:

1) Are the parameters to authenticate() not necessary? I haven't figured out exactly how that function works.

code:
$user = $userob -> authenticate();

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2) strcasecmp() usage:

code:
if strcasecmp($olduser,$newuser)==1 {

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should be

code:
if (!strcasecmp($olduser,$newuser)) {

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Or maybe your original code is easier to understand. I'm not sure.

code:
if (strtolower($olduser) == strtolower($newuser)) {

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3)

code:
$upandlow = true;

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should be

code:
$upandlow = 1;

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4)

code:
$newmods = addslashes($newmods);

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should be

code:
$newmods_q = addslashes($newmods);

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I've made some enhancements to my copy of the hack:
a) Expanded explanation of what the hack does in the entry form.
b) Added more safety checks, including those done by adduser.php.

Should I merge my changes into your version and upload that?

[] Are the parameters to authenticate() not necessary? I haven't figured out exactly how that function works.

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Yes, the authentication function has been changed in V6, so all necessary parameters are set by default. Look at ubbt.inc.php for details.

There shouldn't be any difference betweem strcasecmp and strtolower, but i'll choose the first one cause i don't know how strtolower behaves on '"@| etc...

Yes, i missed the "!" before the statement, removed it for testing.

code:
$upandlow = 1; and $upandlow = true;

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Both should work, i'm used to set boolean = true/false from java programming.

code:
 $newmods_q = addslashes($newmods); 

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Yep, missed that one, thanx.

[] I've made some enhancements to my copy of the hack:
a) Expanded explanation of what the hack does in the entry form.
b) Added more safety checks, including those done by adduser.php.

---

Greatly appreciated

Re: authenticate() - thanks, that's what I thought, but wasn't sure.

That's a good point about strtolower() not converting special characters to lower case. Although, I think Rick uses strtolower() in other places for comparing usernames. I wonder if that's a potential problem.

This is PHP, not Java.

I believe in using the idioms for whatever language I'm using. In PHP (and Perl and C), boolean operations are designed to work with 0 for "false" and nonzero for "true". Using "true" and "false" in PHP is a bad practice, because you're fighting the language. For example, both "true" and "false" evaluate as true in boolean context. And if you want to compare two boolean values, it's simpler (and more reliable) if you stick with the language conventions.

But if you're going to use "true" anyway, the quotes should be present. Depending on the PHP version and the error_reporting() level, true (without the quotes) will result in a warning or error message.

I'll post my modified version.

[] Although, I think Rick uses strtolower() in other places for comparing usernames.

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Yep, that's why i used it at first. But as you have mentioned, i'm not really familiar with PHP.
Will stick to to 1 and 0 now

I may have been wrong about the 1/0 and true/false stuff.

I just noticed in the PHP manual that in version 4, there are keywords True and False. I haven't had time to see exactly how they work.

It was pointed out in another post that the w3t_PollData.P_IP column contains a username (or an IP address).

I assume this needs to be added to the script?

Yes, if you wanna have 100% clean code.
The you also have to change w3t.PollData.P_Name and w3t.Polls.P_Name.
Both contain the combination of the ip and the username who started the poll. The Poll is identified via that fields.

But you can't edit polls anyway so not updating this fields shouldn't cause any problems. Also it's not perfect then...

Any chance we might see the newer version?

There's a good chance

I'm in the middle of doing other things, but I haven't forgotten about this.

I'm back to working on this now.

I'm trying to figure out who to list in the History or Credits section. Is the following accurate? If not, please make corrections or additions.

sixpack69 - original author of UBB.threads version 5 hack (5/01)
Dr_Manhattan - reworked hack (11/01)
Max Fisch - reworked hack (2/02)
Lisa_P - adapted hack for version UBB.threads version 6 (5/02)
Astaran - added fix so that hack would work correctly when old and new usernames differ only in alphabetic case. (6/02)

References:
Plug-in: change username
Change Username Hack, reposted
Change Username Hack

sounds good... it can always be updated if some obscure person was missed, like the dude that asks questions, me

[:"red"]CAUTION: THIS HAS NOT BEEN FULLY TESTED[/]

NAME: Change Username
VERSION: 2.0.0
DESCRIPTION: Changes a username, or merges two usernames
WORKING UNDER: UBB.threads 6.0.2
PREREQUISITES: none
AUTHORS: sixpack69, Dr_Manhattan, Max Fisch, Lisa_P, Astaran, Dave_L
CREDITS: documentation adapted from that provided by Max Fisch
DEMO: none
FILES ALTERED: admin/menu.php
DATABASE ALTERED: username changed
NEW FILES: admin/sk_changeuser.php, admin/sk_dochangeuser.php, admin/sk_changeuser.inc.php

HISTORY:
2001-05-04 sixpack69 - Original release (UBB.threads version 5).
2001-07-14 Dr_Manhattan - Reworked.
2001-11-09 Dr_Manhattan - Revised.
2002-02-13 Max Fisch - Modified to include more database conversion.
2002-05-29 Lisa_P - Adapted for UBB.threads version 6.
2002-06-25 Astaran - Added fix so that hack would work correctly when old and new usernames differ only in alphabetic case.
2002-07-06 Dave_L - Expanded displayed information on entry form, and added same checks that are in adduser.php.

REFERENCES:
Plug-in: change username
Change Username Hack, reposted
Change Username Hack

********
ABSTRACT
********

This modification changes a username, or merges two usernames.

Numerous columns in the database get modified, so it is recommended that you back up the database prior to installing or using this hack.

If the new username already exists, the database information (posts, messages, moderators, etc.) associated with both usernames will be merged and associated with the new username. The settings from the old username will be kept, except for the total post count, which will be adjusted to include the total posts from both usernames. The title doesn't get reset, though, so you may need to modify it manually.

The columns w3t_Polls.P_Name and w3t_PollData.P_Name are *not* converted. Since polls cannot be edited, this is not considered to be a problem.

Hi Dave,
I just looked this over... a couple of questions:
* I didn't see the user and post ratings updated... did I miss them, or are they not converted
* I didn't quite get why uppercase gets converted to lowercase - in the old version, you could modify the capitalization of a name. Was this creating problems in some databases?

Cheers,
Max

1) There's nothing in there now to convert the ratings.

It looks like the w3t_Ratings.R_Rater column needs to be converted.

Also, the w3t_Ratings.R_What column needs to be converted if it's a username (w3t_Ratings.R_Type == 'u'), rather than a post number (w3t_Ratings.R_Type == 't').

In addition, w3t_Posts.B_LastEditBy was left out.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll make a note to add these in. Please let me know if you find anything else missing.

2) It should handle case-conversions correctly. That was one thing that I did test. The lowercase/uppercase stuff had to do with a bug in an earlier version - if the old and new names differed only in case, the user got deleted. The earlier posts in this thread discuss that.

Got it - thanks!

Case conversions worked fine for me with the old version, I did test for that... my guess is that different database/php installations handled it differently, good to hear it's cleaned up.

Cheers,
Max

Found a small mistake in the documentation. In the installation instructions for admin/menu.php, "Replace with" should be "Insert after".

Found some other columns that need to be converted:

w3t_Online.O_Username
w3t_Favorites.F_Owner
w3t_Banned.B_Username

I noticed these when reading a post on the UBB Central demo board.

I took another look at the poll stuff:

w3t_Polls.P_Name (timestamp concatenated with username)
w3t_Polldata.P_Name (timestamp concatenated with username)
w3t_Polldata.P_IP (username or IP address)

I don't think converting the P_Name columns is important, since that appears just to be a way of uniquely identifying the poll. (And it would be messy to convert.)

But the P_IP column is evidently how the script keeps users from voting more than once, so that probably should be converted.

Dave,

No pressure but... I am about to convert over a 1,000+ member forum to threads, and will rely heavily on this hack over the next 24 hours or so - as many of our users have different usernames to their old UBB screen names.

I guess that these other fields could potentially be quite important - is it worth me holding off until you release another update? Or are these other fields not going to cause me major headaches with half converted data?

Cheers,

Ian

I'm attaching an updated version, 2.0.1, which has all the corrections noted above.

I added conversions for the following columns:

w3t_Posts.B_LastEditBy
w3t_Ratings.R_Rater
w3t_Ratings.R_What
w3t_Online.O_Username
w3t_Favorites.F_Owner
w3t_Banned.B_Username
w3t_Polldata.P_IP (username or IP address)

For some of these, I deleted any existing rows for the new username, but I'm not sure whether it's correct to do that.

I would [:"red"]NOT[/] recommend using either the previous version or this new version on a production board until others have reviewed the code and beta-tested it.

Ian, if you are importing a ubb.classic into threads, there is a fix for the import script to import users using their public displayed name. It has been posted a few places... infopop a couple of times. If you can't find it and need it, I'll find it for you

Thanks Allen - but we are going down the login name route - and then altering them.

It is now 05:45 here - and the new forums are live!!! It has been a long night....

Just waiting for the complainst to start now!!

Ian.

heheh... good luck

Thanks - discovered that Moderators are not carried over fully - with 70 forums, it was a lot of PM's that suddenly went out when they were all in place Still we are up and running - now to install a few hacks..... I've also got to add another 150 forums later today or tomorrow!!

This is getting off-topic for this thread, but I don't think there's been a correct fix posted for this. I've hacked the import script to do this (among other things, which I'm still working on), and it involves numerous changes.

Not sure if you have covered this one yet - but if you change a username of a moderator it keeps the old username in the $modlist variable under postlist.php

Apologies if it has already been addressed.

Regards,

Ian

Hmm, this hack deleted one of my moderators when I went to change their name to have some caps. Then I re-added them to the two forums they are a moderator in since they had been removed when they were accidentaly deleted due to the name change hack bug. Anyways... now I added them back as moderator to two boards, and one of the boards they show up twice at the bottom as a moderator. The other board they are listed only once as they should be. I have removed them as moderator and re-added them to the board, and their name is showing up twice again.

Any ideas how I can get this corrected? I am getting razzed about this fairly regularly from the mod, and I just keep telling her she has to do twice the job! hehe

Maybe this is the same as the post above is mentioning?

To fix that, you will need to actually view the contents of the B_Board table and manually correct the moderators listed for the board. I've had to do this once or twice.

Make absolutely sure that you leave a comma before and after the names of the moderator. For example:

,Moderator A,Moderator B,

How do I do edit this file?

Are you using version 2.0.1 of the hack?

Could you dump out the moderator info from the database?

SELECT U_Username,U_Status,U_Groups
FROM w3t_Users
WHERE U_Status='Moderator'

SELECT G_Name,G_Id
FROM w3t_Groups
WHERE G_Name='Moderators'

SELECT Mod_Board,Mod_Username
FROM w3t_Moderators

SELECT Bo_Keyword,Bo_Moderators
FROM w3t_Boards

In w3t_Boards.BoModerators, are all the moderator names both preceded and followed by a comma? It should look like: ",mod1,mod2,mod3,". If the comma at the beginning or end of the string is missing, that would explain the problem, because the hack assumes they're present.

If the commas are present, there may be an inconsistency among the above tables.

See my recent reply to canvey.

Do you know how to view/update your MySQL database using phpMyAdmin or with direct MySQL queries?

If not, if you'll show me the results of those SELECT queries, I can tell you how to fix the problem (if you don't have a large number of boards and moderators).

Houston, we have a problem...

Hi, if I put in a wrong user nickname (to generate an error) I get a WARNING on the error page, that the variable CAT could not be read.

Greetings

Do you mean that for the old username, you enter a nonexistent username? What is the exact error message?

Hi Dave,

I have a suggestion for the Change Username hack. If one wants to change a username as an admin one might click on the 'Edit this user' link under showprofile.php. To reduce the chances of changing the wrong old username, especially when two names could be very similar, I would propose to add the change username option to the selectionoption.php screen under admin.

Therefore I have added the following code to admin/selectoption.php

Find

code:
  $html -> close_table();

   $html -> close_table();
// ----------------
// send the footer
   $html -> send_admin_footer();  

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add just above

code:
// --------------------------------------------------
// Change Username additional mod ICW 13-07-02
   
   if ( ($user['U_Status'] == 'Administrator') && ($Number != '1') ){
   echo "
    <tr><td class=lighttable valign=top>
    <a href="{$config['phpurl']}/admin/sk_changename.php?Cat=$Cat">Change a username</a>
    </td><td class=darktable>
    Change the username.
    </td></tr>
   "; 
   }
   
// --------------------------------------------------
// End of Change Username additional Mod by ICW
  

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Now comes the problem, this works fine to only appear for an admin, and not for a moderator, and also will not show if an admin clicks on the first admin (perhaps that check could be added as default to protect the first admin) - the problem I have is that I cannot pass the username to the sk_changename.php file.

I am guessing that the form neads to be changed to two option fields as in banuser.php - could also the cat bit be added as well so that this is retained in the url.

My problem is that I am starting to get out of my depth so would appreciate some assistance, especially as it will mean me altering the core files.

Also I wondered if we could add in sending a message to both the other admins, and also to the user to inform them off the change - just in case another admin decided to do the dirty

Regards,

Ian

Those are good ideas.

Another feature I'd like to have is a confirmation page.

But I really need to get back to some other work, and probably won't have time to make substantial changes to this hack in the near future. Enhancing the user interface wouldn't be difficult, just time-consuming.

At this point, I think the priority should be to have someone else review the hack's code (primarily the database stuff) for correctness.

Sorry.

Don't be sorry.

This hack was written by about six people. Maybe it's time for someone else to work on it.

But I'm not sure if the database processing is correct, and I wish someone else (who knows more about this stuff than I do) would take a look at that.

Could someone review the code in version 2.01 of the Change Username hack?

It's been sitting there for almost a month, and it needs another pair of eyes to determine whether it's correct. In particular, I'm not sure if too many or too few rows are getting deleted for the old username.

Thanks

Hey Dave

I'm an idiot when it comes to coding, so I'm not much help. I'm curious though, why do you need to use the deletes? Whenever I've changed names manually (meaning through the database) I've been able to do it all just using updates (at least I thought!). Am I missing something? I've always gone back through and done a search for any reference to the old username and I've never found it still showing up (not counting references inside of posts). Have I just been getting lucky?

The deletes are necessary if you're merging two different users into a single user. Otherwise, there would be duplicate rows.

I had a quick look on the code. Looks very advanced.
If i'm read, you always delete the new username, if it already exists, cause you wanna merge them.
I'd prefer to have "merge" as an option (checkbox) cause most of the time, i don't wanna merge users.
I simply don't want to change anything, if the new username already exists. Then the User has to choose another name, he wants to change to.

Hopefully, i can do some testing tomorrow. I'll post my results here, but everything looks fine so far.:)

WOW!, I was hoping to get some help with changing a registar'd users ID as he used an email address for his ID.

I have to admit, I'm lost. I have no idea what and how to even attempt this so I'm afraid to even try this.

I have about 180,000 page views the last month, and this is the first time for me to ever do this. I'm not exactly dumb, but I'd consider myself a little ignorant when trying to understand what you all have been talking about.

Point is, when the smoke is clear, have any of you got a safe way to change a current users name with the newest 6.?? version ubb board. I just set this up in may of this year and I'm scared as He$$ to modify this thing as I have so many that are on here and I'm not wanting to have problems doing a little simple thing I'd thought would have been incorporated.

Any suggests or ideas that might get me in the right direction would really be appreciated.

Here is my email address just in case I can't find this again. [][email protected][/]
http://theoildrop.server101.com/cgi/ultimatebb.cgi

This is a pretty simple hack to install.

Just make sure to backup all changed files and your database so you can restore your board and posts to original condition if things go bad for you. Also, make sure you close your board first to help make things go as smoothly as possible.

posted by Dave_L:

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Could someone review the code in version 2.01 of the Change Username hack?

It's been sitting there for almost a month, and it needs another pair of eyes to determine whether it's correct. In particular, I'm not sure if too many or too few rows are getting deleted for the old username.

Thanks

---

There is a bug when merging users.

I had someone create a new user (RoadRunner) and we merged his old user into this one. Well, all his old posts came over just fine, but any posts made under the new user before the merge disappeared. I found that they were still in the db, but the B_PosterId was still listed under the U_Number of the new user before the merge.

Changing the B_PosterId to the old U_Number made his posts reappear again.

Here's the db changes that were necessary:

// new user number, deleted after merge
mysql> select U_Number from w3t_Users where U_Number = '10195';
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select B_Number,B_Username,B_PosterId from w3t_Posts where B_Number = 4677;
+----------+------------+------------+
| B_Number | B_Username | B_PosterId |
+----------+------------+------------+
| 4677 | RoadRunner | 10195 |
+----------+------------+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select U_Number from w3t_Users where U_Username = 'RoadRunner';
+----------+
| U_Number |
+----------+
| 906 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> update w3t_Posts set B_PosterId = '906' where B_PosterId = '10195';
Query OK, 7 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 7 Changed: 7 Warnings: 0

I've updated the sk_dochangename.php script and attached the new archive.

-Lance

Thanks Lance

I have a question about an earlier version I used. I changed a member's name (merged his old acct with the new so he could use his old public displayed name from ubb.classic) and it worked fine. But now his signature doesn't appear under his posts (double-checked a few times that it is actually there), his rating isn't showing, nor is his avatar.

Is there some kind of update command I can run in phpmyadmin to clear it up and allow those to show?

Try updating the B_PosterId in all of his/her posts.

1. Determine his/her U_Number
2. Run a query like this:
update w3t_Posts set B_PosterId = <his/her U_Number>
where U_Username = <his/her Username>

Hopefully that would do the trick, although with the join in the query, you shouldn't see any posts if the B_PosterId doesn't match.

Give it a try! (And backup your database beforehand!)

-Lance

Thanks Lance Will give it a shot tomorrow

Question, how do you determine someone's U_Number?

nevermind, found it

Getting MySQL error:

code:

SQL-query :  

update w3t_Posts set B_PosterId = <3>
where U_Username = <Allen>


MySQL said: 


You have an error in your SQL syntax near '<3>
where U_Username = <Allen>' at line 1

---

(I practised on a local copy with my own name )

ok, got it to this:

code:

update w3t_posts set B_PosterId = 3
where B_Username = Allen


MySQL said: 


Unknown column 'Allen' in 'where clause'

---

Any possible clues?

This should work:

code:

update w3t_Posts set B_PosterId = '3'
where B_Username = 'Allen'

---

Thanks I used that and it seemed to be ok to the forum, but it said: Rows Affected : 0

Does that mean it didn't make any changes? '3' is the U_Number and 'Allen' is the new name of the user. Should I use the old username in that spot? Or does this not affect older posts, only newer?

You should probably be able to do it with the old username as well, providing that it exists.

But I don't know the internals of this hack so I'm not really sure what has happened.

If no rows were affected, then that must mean the user has no posts at all.

-Lance

hmmm... he's the admin, user number 1, with >5k posts I did run it on his original name and it said 5k+ rows were affected, maybe it fixed it then, if not, I'll run the updated modification here again and see if it fixes it.

Small update to make the hack 6.1 compilant.
Fixed small bug in changeuser.php and added the U_LoginName field.