UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Removing whitespace from usernames

I recently converted my vBulletin board to UBBT successfully, but now I'm running into a minor, but annoying issue.

vBulletin allowed usernames with whitespace in them, UBBT does not. All of my vBulletin users were inserted into my UBBT boards, even the ones with whitespace in their usernames, but now those members (the ones with whitespace in their usernames) are unable to login. I've been fixing this on a case-by-case basis through phpmyadmin (going into the db and removing the whitespace) but it's starting to spiral out of control.

My question is: is there a way to run a query on the database that will look for whitespace in a username and remove it (just putting the two words together, i.e. joe smith to joesmith)? This way I can just send out a mass email letting everyone know that if their username contained a whitespace, it no longer does.

Any help would be apprectiated.

JL

I don't think you can do that with a single query. It would probably require a short PHP script.

I don't understand why you're having this problem. When I imported from UBB.classic, there were lots of usernames with whitespace, and that didn't cause any login problems. As far as I know, the syntax checking on usernames is only done when a new user registers, or when an existing user edits his profile and changes his display name.

I've since hacked my board to allow whitespace in usernames, but that's a different issue.

I had just assumed that this was the issue becuase I've only received login problem emails from users with whitespace in their names. Then once I remove the whitespace, they don't have problems logging in.

Can you tell me how to hack the board to allow whitespace in usernames? Maybe that will solve the issue.

Here's my modified syntax checking in adduser.php. There's a similar change in changebasic.php for editing display names.



But this has nothing to do with logging in, so I'd be surprised if it solved your problem. Is it possible that the vB imported messed up something else? Or could it be a cookie problem?

Is 6.2 completely using user numbers now in all tables?

I'd only suggest trying this if no one finds a flaw in this suggestion and you have a test board setup to test this on first.

This should show you people that have spaces:

select U_Username, U_LoginName from w3t_Users where U_Username LIKE "% %" OR U_LoginName LIKE "% %"

This should show you the results of replacing:

select U_Username, U_LoginName, REPLACE(U_LoginName," ","") as Changed_LoginName, REPLACE(U_Username," ","") as Changed_Username from w3t_Users where U_Username LIKE "% %" OR U_LoginName LIKE "% %"

This would execute the update to replace login names:
(Assuming the above queries replace names correctly)

update w3t_Users set U_LoginName=REPLACE(U_LoginName," ","") where U_LoginName LIKE "% %"

You would repeat that for U_Username too.

I used a similar update to replace the image path used in uploaded avatars, and just copied that over here. If usernames are still used in other tables then this would cause problems.

I don't think that I'm even going to mess with this. I thought that there might be some easy workaround, but it's gettting a little too complex for me (plus, I'd rather deal with it on a case-by-case basis than crash my whole db).

Dave, you may be right that the import messed something up or it could be a cookie problem. I'll investigate a little further into both of these items.

Do you have the option to "allow special characters" turned on in the config file? If that were off... it might be messing up folks logging in.

Actually, Josh, no I didn't have it turned on. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I just enabled it, so I'll see how it goes.