# Dropped special characters in usernames

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropped-special-characters-in-usernames/125378>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [August 10, 2019, 2:33am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropped-special-characters-in-usernames/125378 "2019-08-10T02:33:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Kat\_F](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/kat_f/32/161990_2.png) [@Kat\_F](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Kat_F)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2019, 2:33am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropped-special-characters-in-usernames/125378/1 "2019-08-10T02:33:24Z")

</div>

On our main site there are often people who use underscores and dashes in usernames. When they are ported to our Discourse forum, one or more of those characters is often dropped from the username, resulting in a mismatch.

The forum is provided for the site users only and being able to correlate between the usernames is important.

Examples:  
kayakaya\_ becomes kayakaya  
\_\_aena13 becomes \_aena13

At present we haven’t figured out how to either automatically delete or disable forum accounts when the mains are closed or at least generate a report. Is that possible?

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropped-special-characters-in-usernames/125378)._