BuddyPress.org

I’m pretty inexperienced with web development, and I’m setting up a Buddypress site for the first time. I’m experience all kinds of craziness with usernames that is bound to confuse the users. Here are the problems.

1. On the “Edit User” page, the “Username” field shows the username for the user who is logged in, not for the user whose profile is being edited (with or without Buddypress).

2. At registration, leading, trailing and consecutive spaces in username generate incorrect error message (with or without Buddypress).

3. At registration, some valid WordPress username characters (e.g. ‘_’) generate an error with Buddypress.

4. At registration, single interior spaces in username are removed from username without notice.

5. When ‘-‘, ‘.’, or ‘@’ are used in a username, Buddypress uses an altered version of the username in many situations instead of the real username, even though the registration page specified that usernames can contain these characters. The altered version is formed by removing all ‘@’s and replacing a sequences of ‘-‘s and ‘.’s with a single ‘-‘. For example, when sending messages to a user, you have to type the altered username instead of the real one. URLs contain the altered version. The “Howdy” message contains the altered version. I tried inserting the line define( ‘BP_ENABLE_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE’, true ); into wp-config.php as suggested at but I didn’t see any effect.

This is a mess. Please help. I would prefer to allow all the characters I can, but if there is a way to fix these problems by forbidding some characters, I would accept it. Also, I can’t find any specification of what WordPress considers to be valid usernames.

Thanks.