For those of you who haven't looked at the hack ( ), it trims duplicate spaces from usernames, as well as spaces from before or after the username.

Legal:
"Garrett [space] Albright"

Illegal:
"Garrett [space] [space] Albright"
"[space] Garrett [space] Albright"
"Garrett [space] Albright [space]"

The hack will (effectively but inelegantly) transform all of those illegal names to "Garrett [space] Albright", and an error will be produced if that's already registered.

As for disallowing people to register with, say, "Garrett [space] Alb [space] right" if "Garrett [space] Albright" is already registered... I don't think that's too much of an issue, because a space like that will be more visible. That, and to implement it most effectively, we'd probably have to add a new field to Xoops' user database; the username with spaces stripped. That way, XOOPS would strip the spaces from the username someone tries to register with, check it against the username with spaces stripped fields in the DB, then pop up an error if it comes up with a match. I'm fairly certain other CMS/forum scripts don't bother with this, and, as I've said before, I don't think it's that necessary.

As_for_preferring_underscores... I'm_sorry,_but_I_just_hate_them,_for_reasons_that_should_be_quite_obvious. CamelCaseCanDieTooPlease.

Okay... so you're saying the problem occurred even with a non-edited version of register.php, and therefore the problem isn't related to your hack?

Just wanna make sure... I couldn't entirely understand either your or Herko's posts. For what it's worth, I just tested the group modification thingy, and I can see both boxes. I've been running a site which has had this hack for about a week now, and it has had members joining it for the last four days or so; sixteen of the members have put spaces in their name, and no incidents so far. I'd like to hear from others who have had had successes -- or disasters -- with this hack, please...

Herko: Perhaps I shall take your advice and submit this as a patch, though I'm a bit nervous as it will be my first time doing such a thing... That, and it could be a tad more efficient.

Shucks. It's just a li'l ol' three-minute hack, and I had to look up more info on regular expressions in order to do it (my regex experience is laughable).

Though one has to wonder that, if it really is this easy and it doesn't seem to break XOOPS at all, just what the XOOPS team's reason for going out of their way to prevent spaces in usernames was in the first place... I'm sure they had one.

Ah, yeah, good eye, KubaZ... I also adjusted my post and added a line of code so that people can't spoof as people with spaces in the middle of their names ("The [space] Admin" and "The [space] [space] Admin.") trim() should put the kaibosh on all-space usernames too, so I took that part out as well.

Normal hack caveats apply.

We're going to edit one file: register.php. Open it up, and go to lines 60-73. It should look something like this...



The following line of code should be added BEFORE this block of code. This line will prevent people from creating new accounts which "spoof" currently-existing accounts by adding extraneous spaces. For example, without this line, someone could spoof "The [space] Administrator" by creating an account with the name "The [space] [space] Administrator." This person wouldn't really have admin powers, but they could appear to post as the admin.



Now, before the ] in the first two lines that start with $restriction, we want to add "\s", which signifies a whitespace as created by the space bar; on the third $restriction line, it needs to be "\s\". (Depending on your "strictness" setting in the User Info section of the site Preferences, you actually only have to edit the relevant line, but in order to not "break" things should you change this setting in the future, we'll do all three.) Note that \ is a BACKSLASH (the key above Return and below Delete on a Mac or above Enter and below Backspace on a PC), not a / SLASH (which shares a key with the ? question mark.) The block of code, with the line added to the beginning, should look like this...



Now there's one more thing we gotta do. Let's look at lines 90-92 (they were lines 89-91 before we added that line of code above);



We don't want these lines. You could delete them if you want, but I suggest we "comment out" the lines instead. This means we're going to signify this code as a "comment" which should be ignored. To do this, we want to put /* before the block, and */ after it. (Note we're using a / slash this time, and not a \ backslash.)



Save the file, and make a test account with a space in the username to make sure it works.

Xoops seems to work just fine with usernames with spaces... Let me know if something broke in your case.

Ah, I found the problem. I had to click "Groups" in the xcGallery admin menu (which then let me set permissions as to who could upload pics and leave comments and such).

Xoops is great, but it really stands to gain a heck of a lot more documentation. :P

Okay, I created an album, so... How do I actually add an image to it?

I see an "Edit Pics" button next to the album, but that just whines about there being no pictures in the album. (Um... yes. That's why I want to add some.) A non-admin test user account I made sees even less.