Hi. We’re in progress of moving a big community on Discourse from vb3. Many usernames - around 1.200 - do contain the exclamation mark “!” and I couldn’t find any option to re-enable it. We already enabled “unicode usernames” to no avail. Is there any ready solution for this issue? Thank you!

[image] Jay Pfaffman: This is the first time I remember anyone complaining about it. I found a couple of topics: https://meta.discourse.org/t/username-restrictions/126664 [image] What are the Discourse rules for usernames? Support Hello, please can someone point me in the direction of the rules for usernames? I’m trying to establish if ampersands and apostrophes are allowed or not but I cannot find anything in here that helps me. Many thanks. It’s probably going to be alot more than just exclamation marks. Seems such a strange limitation, since you can use those characters anywhere else. Anyway, thank you for your help.

It’s worth pointing out that names and usernames aren’t the same thing. Usernames are used in URL paths, for example: https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman/summary An exclamation mark isn’t a valid character in a URL, while characters such as ? & have special purposes in URL structure and therefore also can’t be part of a username. This isn’t specific to Discourse, any system which uses the username in the URL structure has to respect this. A username can’t contain an exclamation mark, but the name can, which you can prioritize in the UI.

makes perfect sense @Stephen, thanks for clarifying. I think we could just alter the import script to do something like: username_original = username username = @htmlentities.decode(user["username"]).strip { id: user["userid"], name: username_original, username: username, password: password, [...] And in the discourse setting enable the priority for the user “name”, if it’s present, over the username.

[image] Stephen: It’s worth pointing out that names and usernames aren’t the same thing. Usernames are used in URL paths In addition to this, usernames are meant to be used in @mentions, and so the expectation is that usernames will be straightfoward and easy to type; that’s why we only allow ASCII characters by default (though that can be expanded to unicode by the unicode_usernames setting, though still no punctuation). [image] Crius: I think we could just alter the import script to do something like Note that that migration script uses the non bulk migration script base class, which does this with each user record generated by the method you linked: script/import_scripts/base.rb main location = opts.delete(:location) avatar_url = opts.delete(:avatar_url) original_username = opts[:username] original_name = opts[:name] original_email = opts[:email] = opts[:email].downcase if !UsernameValidator.new(opts[:username]).valid_format? || !User.username_available?(opts[:username]) opts[:username] = UserNameSuggester.suggest( opts[:username].presence || opts[:name].presence || opts[:email], ) end if !EmailAddressValidator.valid_value?(opts[:email]) opts[:email] = fake_email puts "Invalid email '#{original_email}' for '#{opts[:username]}'. Using '#{opts[:email]}'" end opts[:name] = original_username if original_name.blank? && opts[:username] != original_username which strips any invalid characters from usernames. There are many places in the code that assume certain things about usernames (@mention parsing, changing usernames, etc), which is the reason why we enforce these restrictions. Like Stephen says, usernames are not the place to show user personality; the name and flair fields are :slight_smile:

[image] Leonardo Mosquera: Like Stephen says, usernames are not the place to show user personality; the name and flair fields are There’s still quite a few fringe cases that are difficult to manage with it being this way. Names are non-unique, if we give priority in the layout to the name you can imagine how that would go in a message board full of immature teenagers that game and troll all day :slight_smile: It’s perfectly fine to say that it might be a low priority issue, still it’s something that could clearly use some thought and work and for sure not a “feature” or something that gives an advantage over being able to choose an unique name without strong limits like any other bb software that’s been around.

[image] Stephen: An exclamation mark isn’t a valid character in a URL If the user is pfaffman! the URL would usually be: https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman&#33/summary At least, any other CMS I’ve ever worked on worked like this

[image] AV C: At least, any other CMS I’ve ever worked on worked like this Oh, cool! Prior art. :+1: Would you mind sharing some of the open source CMS projects you’ve used? We can take a look at them and see how they handle the permalinks and user references, learn from their efforts. :slight_smile: Although… I wonder if Content Management Systems is the exact same bucket as Community Forums? :thinking: [image] AV C: We’re in progress of moving a big community on Discourse from vb3. Does “vb3” refer to vBulletin?

[image] maiki: Does “vb3” refer to vBulletin? Yep Also, the mention of special characters being encoded is not something unique of CMS, it’s just standard encoding: Percent-encoding - Glossary | MDN

But then how would we mention folks, @Crius?! :point_up: :smiley: :point_down: But then how would we mention folks, @Crius?! Would we type @maiki&#33, to mention someone with maiki! as a username? :thinking: How does it work in vBulletin?

vBulletin 3 doesn’t have that features and vBulletin 5… I’ve no idea if it even has the feature as it’s a software that clearly has been left behind in terms of modern features. When you ping someone on discourse an auto-suggest comes up. No need to worry about having to type the full nickname. Edit: Eventually it means having the suggest decode the list of usernames before suggesting it if you really want, or encode the input (the user writing the partial) so that it can search for the username appropriately. I mean, we can argue about how much work and effort it takes, but not “if” it’s possible. In any case, I don’t know if it’s just the media being a bad at passing the mood but all these recent replies felt kinda “hostile”. People comes on meta.discourse to ask for help and suggest things to improve. If you don’t agree you can just ignore the thread and move on. Also, I forgot to add. If PRs are open for discourse, I can try and work on it in a fork and open a PR. Granted I’m not a ruby developer but I’ve several years of working as software engineer / platform engineer. I’ll be glad to try and contribute :slight_smile:

Exclamation mark and special characters in usernames

Product Support Migration

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) April 22, 2024, 6:19pm 27

Did you base it on an existing import script? If you had, it would call discourse/lib/user_name_suggester.rb at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub and just worked.

Topic		Replies	Views
Unicode usernames and group names Announcements new-feature	33	9566	February 25, 2025
Members problem on importing Mybb to Discourse Migration mybb	25	3750	September 4, 2017
Dropped special characters in usernames Product Support	8	2507	February 25, 2020
Any options for over-riding the username restrictions? Product Support	14	4397	September 6, 2018
Recent migration to discourse caused usernames to change! Product Support	11	393	October 7, 2024

Exclamation mark and special characters in usernames

Related topics