[SOLVED] Question Mark in Username

I have never messed with the username field on any of my sites. It was bound to happen at some point...someone used a question mark in their username, which CB accepted, and now it is impossible to visit that person's profile. Instead, the link directs whoever clicks it to their own profile.

Thought you might want to know about this and suggest a validation other than "any string" (the default) for usernames and even change the default to something that does not conflict with how CB works.

Regards,
Bruce

bascherz wrote: I have never messed with the username field on any of my sites. It was bound to happen at some point...someone used a question mark in their username, which CB accepted, and now it is impossible to visit that person's profile. Instead, the link directs whoever clicks it to their own profile.

Thought you might want to know about this and suggest a validation other than "any string" (the default) for usernames and even change the default to something that does not conflict with how CB works.

Regards,
Bruce

Hmm, I am pretty sure that CB follows Joomla validation for usernames

Hi Nant...

That's quite possible. But Joomla doesn't use the username to form a path to a person's profile like CB does, does it? That's the problem it is causing. I am hoping that by specifying a Perl RegEx validation on the entry CB does that on the username before it gets submitted to Joomla for whatever validation it does.

Thanks,
Bruce

It's not possible for a question mark to render in the SEF URL. The question mark will be replaced with a dash. Example as follows.

User ID: 50
Username: question?mark
URL: 50-question-mark

If using unicode aliases you'd have the below.

URL: 50-questionmark

Hmmm... Now I'll have to go figure out where I saw it happen. It's quite possible it was a link my own code formed using substitutions, which wouldn't surprise me at all. I'll reply again when I figure it out. Thanks, Kyle.

It had to have been some link I created using substitution but which is no longer on the affected site. The links in the site member lists all work as you describe. What I was doing was a little specific.

I customized the "Who's Online" module "User Text" box to conditionally show links to the user's profile using Regular Labs Conditional Content plugin so that I could publicly show who is online by name without the links being there (just the names). I constructed the links as "/menuitem/profile/[username]", which works for every user except the one whose username ends with a question mark. In that case, the link goes to MY (the current user) profile.

So I looked more into field substitution and found this:

Which always takes the current user to their own profile. So I thought maybe I could modify it as follows (but none of these worked):
or or
Maybe I just need to know more about how the User Text box for the "Who's Online" module works.

Bruce