Re: www bugs. Please read.

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Arafat Mohamed <biku at comcast dot net> wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 18:28:46 -0600
> Arafat Mohamed <biku at comcast dot net> wrote:
> > 1) refuse re-registration
> > 2) check for invalid chars at registration.
> 
> Guys, especially Nadim,

Sorry for the delay - I've had a backlog of emails to get through.

> 1) Currently the registration process automatically assigns a username to new
> registrants. The only way to check if the user already exists is to verify
> against email (which the site currently does). Was there something else you
> had in mind for this?

>From a couple of conversations on IRC with various newbies that dislike
their usernames, I think it would be best to give the person registering
the option of selecting (or entering) his/her own username.  If the username
is taken, then a prompt with suggestions or fall back to what is being done
today (ie. worst case scenario being first_letter_of_first_name + last_name + 
last_2_digits_of_birth).

I'm guessing that some people had multi-registered with fake lastnames to
get the username they like.  Just a hunch.

As for checking, email and username existence is more than sufficient.
Case in point, search for user 'Elaatifi' why does he have 2 accounts ?
We should not have allowed him to re-register and instead prompted him
to correct his already pre-existing account instead - I'm sure there
are others.  In short, if the username exists and the first and last
names match what is in the database, then that's a clear hit and a new
account should not be created (do make sure that this is safe somehow
so that others can't kill people's accounts/etc).

> 2) Should I consider any character not alpha (a-z) invalid? What about
> hyphens for last names? Any other char you think is valid?

I'd go with strict ASCII.  No dashes/slashes/etc and I would even bound
the names to some reasonable safe upper limit (say 30 characters or
something).  So if someone comes in with last name of 'Al Insan' or
'Al-Insan' or 'Al_Insan' all should be 'alinsan' (no caps to ease life)
so as not to possibly let anyone run scripts or do anything funny.

Just my $0.02's worth.

Salam.

 - Nadim

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