Spaces/non-ASCII characters in usernames

Tyler

Okay, thanks Franz 😃!

imi415

And recently I discovered that it may cause error when the username contains none-English charachers, such as Chinese charachers. In some cases, these charachers are URL-Encoded and won't cause any problem, but in other cases, URL with these characters cause an resource not found error. I think the problem could be fixed by URL-Encoding all none-English characters.

VivekanandhanT

Free online tool for php urlencode function..
kindly take a look on this.. http://onlinew3tools.com/url-encode

MaxPan

Is there any solutions?

Brightside56

Yes, it would great to have a possibility to use any characters in display name. Situation which we have now is a nonsense for 2k18

SHC

A better solution which I think is to have only ASCII characters for user name, and have a separate field called as Display Name.

The USERNAME will be used in the slug, in the URLs and in the user and discussion tables.
The DISPNAME will be used in the frontend, whenever we show the user.

This is a better solution as it allows for having customizable display names, and a user name (simple one) to be used with login and when mentioning the user.

Another suggestion is to treat user names just like in Twitter, show the display name followed by username in parantheses. This will also help the people to use the correct mentions.

How about this?

SHC

It could look like this for my old post:

Demo Art

P.S. Please ignore any inconsistant fonts in the above edit.

What do you think about this by the way?

clarkwinkelmann

SHC beta 8 actually ships with display name support in core. It's just a matter of creating an extension that hooks into the GetDisplayName event 😉

No doubt somebody will create such an extension soon. This could even be a core extension, but I don't know if that's the plan.

Mark73

Is this still not possible? It's frustrating to know that we cannot use spaces in usernames!

clarkwinkelmann

Mark73 there is now a Nickname extension making use of the display name feature I described in 2018 https://discuss.flarum.org/d/21238-nickname-changer

There are plans to allow more characters in usernames in the future, but it's likely not coming anytime soon. I'm not sure we will ever allow spaces as it's super hard to deal with them in URLs and mentions. Spaces sound like a great case for display name.

Mark73

clarkwinkelmann I'm aware of the nickname changer extension and I believe it's a pretty good one. However, I still think it would be confusing when a newcomer tries to mention someone thinking that his display name is his username and not be able to find him. Looking forward to seeing this getting figured out in the near future.

tankerkiller125

Mark73 Spaces in usernames is always a complex topic and thing to handle. Just for some examples most services do not allow spaces if they also allow mentioning users (eg. github, discord, etc.) as it adds a ton of complexity as to where does the username end and the content begin? General UTF8 would be great to implement in the future, but I think spaces add a whole layer of complexity that for most people isn't an issue. One thing I do think might be good is a UI change if a username has a Nickname set so that both the username and the nickname get shown (like Github does on the profile pages).

Mark73

tankerkiller125 Agree with you regarding the last suggestion

clarkwinkelmann

Reading the source code, Flarum is supposed to show the Display Name in mentions https://github.com/flarum/mentions/blob/master/src/ConfigureMentions.php

And you're also supposed to be able to search via Display Name when mentioning https://github.com/flarum/mentions/blob/master/js/src/forum/addComposerAutocomplete.js#L100

So basically insertion should work just like in Discord, where you can press @, type any nickname you know the user by, and it will insert their actual Discord username even if it's completely different.

In addition, the mention block should show the Display Name in read mode, so discussion readers shouldn't even see the username that was typed in the message.

I have however not tested the Nickname extension. If the above isn't working, consider reporting it as a bug in Flarum.

tankerkiller125

clarkwinkelmann from my own experience with the nickname extension, mentions work the way you describe, and mentions still show correctly after nick name changes, usernames changes or even disabling the extension.

Mark73

clarkwinkelmann tankerkiller125
That's very interesting, I thought that mentioning should be only via usernames and not nicknames. This actually solves it all, thanks guys for pointing it out 🙂

ctml

I would like to see periods allowed. I am trying to integrate through SSO with my existing system with around 10k users. I can replace with another character like dash '-' but those are also allowed in my system, so then I could end up having duplicate users in flarum which would be catastrophic 😃

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/21666-php-and-wordpress-single-sign-on-sso/295

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