Duplicate names are possible.

July 24, 2001 7:35 PM

It is possible to sign up under the same name as someone else, using a [SPACE] before the username. That is a bad thing.
posted by jpoulos to Bugs at 7:35 PM (9 comments total)

crap. I know how to fix this, thanks for pointing it out. It'll get fixed this evening.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:11 PM on July 24, 2001

You may also want to make sure of other non-visible characters...
posted by fooljay at 10:41 PM on July 24, 2001

It should just be a simple adding a: Trim(new_user_name) check before checking for existing usernames. It's actually in the 5k codebase, so I'm relying on Eric to fix it.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:24 PM on July 24, 2001

so you don't allow metachars? I've seen ™ in usernames (Zippity Jesus) What's the ASCII code for backspace (or spaces. Spaces in username....BAAAAAD)??

lc([A-Za-z0-9-_.])


posted by fooljay at 12:40 AM on July 25, 2001

aw hell

what about capital "i" and lower case "l".

What a crap alphabet we have!
posted by Kafkaesque at 9:39 AM on July 25, 2001

not a crap alphabet, crap fonts. :)
posted by pnevares at 10:21 AM on July 25, 2001

It's also possible to have usernames that differ only by internal spaces. For example "baby(one space)jesus" and "baby(two spaces)jesus". Since HTML collapses multiple spaces down to one, these both would look the same on MeFi.
posted by kindall at 12:11 PM on July 25, 2001

I owe Matt an apology for making extra work for him. On the one hand, if i hadn't made baby(three spaces)jesus, someone else might have eventually done something like it. On the other, I might have mentioned the bug to him instead of exploiting it for a joke.
posted by kindall at 1:15 PM on July 25, 2001

Exploiting it for a joke makes the baby Jesus...

Oh, never mind.

Seriously, thanks, Kindall -- this is something that never even occured to me in some of my own work.

posted by snarkout at 1:44 PM on July 25, 2001