Reserved usernames: wildcard?

We had someone register with a reserved username, getting around the restriction by the simple expedient of adding “1” to the end. I can’t tell if the system will accept a wildcard entry to prevent this, i.e., by declaring

reservedusername*

in the list. I’m a little hesitant to use the “just try it and see” method. Can anyone enlighten me?

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It will, we mention it in the description below the setting

Usernames for which signup is not allowed. Wildcard symbol * can be used to match any character zero or more times.

reservedusername* should prevent reservedusername1 from being registered

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–Ha! I should look more closely at what’s in front of me. Thanks!

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But people will be able to register reserved_username.

Maybe it’s an idea to look at the Levenshtein distance instead of using a wildcard?

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Yow, that would probably be a lot more bulletproof, but I’m not sure it’s worth that degree of effort. Out of curiosity, would you use a reg ex test of some kind? Can you do that in the Discourse admin?

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This might be more effort than it’s worth… It would catch reserved_username1 but it probably wouldn’t catch official_reserved_username, right? this is the type of thing that a motivated person would always find a way around.

We have a regex setting for blocked/censored words, and that seems like a reasonable way to enhance reserved usernames (which only has the wildcard)… but does this problem come up often enough to justify prioritizing that? I don’t think it’s a complaint we’ve had often.

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We only found the one instance when we searched our user names, so yeah, I don’t think it calls for anything too elaborate.

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Exactly, so why support wildcards then? :thinking:

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Isn’t that just reason to separately block reserved and username?

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