Side-effects of allowing "special" characters in username?

Shmizzle

Using $Configuration['Garden']['User']['ValidationRegex'] in config.php, I just expanded the regex to allow a few extra characters in peoples' usernames, namely the period, parenthesis, and brackets ([ and ]).

This did cause an issue with the Quotes plugin until I changed the regex in there, and now that works okay. I just wanted to see if there was anything else that might possibly break or have issues because to this change, or if I should be good to go?

hgtonight

Mentions will be broken.

This means you don't be able to @Shmizzle a user to notify them.

Shmizzle

Thanks. I actually disabled that feature when I first installed the forum, so that's no big deal.

Anything else do you think?

Shadowdare

Not much else will be broken as most of Vanilla and many plugins use the unique user ID instead of the user name for references to users in the code.

peregrine

I believe plugins that use url formatting of username with unicode might have a problem, if you are using unicode since one of the functions strips punctuation.

if you are not using unicode the above is a moot point.

at least what i gather from below

e.g.

 public static function Url($Mixed) {
          if (!is_string($Mixed))
             return self::To($Mixed, 'Url');

          // Preliminary decoding
          $Mixed = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($Mixed, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'));
          $Mixed = strtr($Mixed, self::$_UrlTranslations);

          // Test for Unicode PCRE support
          // On non-UTF8 systems this will result in a blank string.
          $UnicodeSupport = (preg_replace('`[\pP]`u', '', 'P') != '');

          // Convert punctuation, symbols, and spaces to hyphens
          if ($UnicodeSupport)
             $Mixed = preg_replace('`[\pP\pS\s]`u', '-', $Mixed);