A discussion was started by RGJ regarding the user profile page canonical URL not being case normalized. For example, https://meta.discourse.org/u/DiscObOt and https://meta.discourse.org/u/discobot both work, but the canonical URL is not normalized to the official case of the username. Sam suggests normalizing the username to lowercase and forcing a redirect for mis-cased usages, similar to how topic and category URLs are normalized. codinghorror agrees and suggests adding it to andrei’s list, who has added it with low priority. stance455 also agrees with cleaning this up and points out that different canonical URLs are used for each variation. Additionally, stance455 notes that tag URLs also exhibit similar behavior and suggests normalizing them to lowercase.
It seems like URL’s to user profiles are not case sensitive.
For instance https://meta.discourse.org/u/DiscObOt works just as well as https://meta.discourse.org/u/discobot
But the canonical URL in the first variation is not canonicalized into the ‘official’ case of the username, possibly leading to duplicate content issues or the wrong variation being indexed.
We should normalize the username to lowercase username and force a redirect for the various obscure mis-cased usages similar to how we normalize topic urls / category urls.