Case Sensitive Usernames

[MikiHeart]

Aaand I'm back!

I'm helping my younger sister with her site now that she's ready to proceed.

One thing that has always bugged me with the script, since it's very creation, is that usernames are case sensitive. I'm one of those people who like having the first letter of my username as uppercase.

However, although I know that I need to put in the uppercase, it makes it confusing for users.

I set my username is "Miki" When installing the script. But if I sign in as "miki" it won't work.

The way it use to be was that someone can register as "Miki" "miki" "MiKi" or "mIkI" and so on and so fourth. I'm wondering if that's still the case?

I would really love to be able to remove the case sensitiveness because in general, sites don't use that. It bugs me, and I don't want others to be able to register a name the same as an admin, but in different casing.

 

[Kyttias]

Although not an instruction on where and how to fix (mostly because I'm off to bed in a few), I read somewhere once that the best way to make usernames feel case insensitive during the log-in process is to use a strtolower() function on both the username entered and on the data collected from the database. It won't matter how it's stored in the database or how the user entered it, as both are being converted to lowercase strings just during the checking process.

However, checking like this should also be done during the registration process, of course, to convert whatever the user submitted to lowercase, and running against the database usernames (also converted to lowercase), to make sure no user names exist sharing those letters (regardless of case).

In no case are the usernames being stored or displayed as anything other than how they were initially registered, it'd be just for checking on the backend. (Although some propose saving a second column that is a version of the user's username, only lowercase, for faster checking.)

Would anyone else like to take it from here?

(PS: While we're at fixing the registration usernames, this bug over here needs fixing, too.)

 

[MikiHeart]

Okay, thank you for that. I'm a little rusty with php, but I'll have to start getting back into it.

I can google further on stuff like this, and I'll post my findings and if I'm able to get it done. Or I'll ask for further help.

As for the bug, I did have a look at that. I'm more curious as to why usernames are allowed to have Apostrophes to begin with. Personally, I think that users shouldn't have spaces either. It should be letters, numbers, and hythens and underscores. I think that's what I would try to change my own website to.

But then when I think about it, I guess spaces aren't too bad, if you're going to have NPCs and stuff. (Which I plan to do, as well as having a forum at some point, but that's a long way off)