[zooney]

…I just don’t see the sense in BuddyPress needing to treat usernames in a different manner than WordPress does. It smacks of a questionable design decision, that’s all.

Regardless, I’m not getting this problem in BuddyPress 1.2 it seems…

…although in BuddyPress 1.2 I’m getting “There was a problem posting your update, please try again.” everytime I try to do anything, but that’s a different story.

[zooney]

I’ve come to a resolution in the Bug Report I filed.

One foolish error on my part was placing the define statement in the wrong area of wp-config.php (after the “no more edits” comment).

Regardless, I think this has clarified the bug I was actually experiencing.

The BP_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE flag does stop the issues associated with periods in the username from occurring, as it appears to be designed to.

I’m running into an problem, however, where usernames with “@” in them are causing a very odd issue. For some reason if a username has an “@” in it, it will cause 2 problems I’ve found so far:

1.) Clicking on the “Create a Group” link takes you back to the BuddyPress home page

2.) Posting on your own wire does post the message, but for some reason redirects you to the BuddyPress home page after hitting post.

…I have to admit I’m a little baffled as to why there needs to be a “username compatibility mode”. Wouldn’t using the “user_nicename” for everything (except just literally displaying the username) sidestep any issues with the actual form of the username? I’m just speaking from my wealth of ignorance, but that just seems weird to me.

[zooney]

Hrrm… That’s interesting, but the thing about my issue is that I would like to default to user_login and not user_nicename (user_nicename is causing the problem).

From your fix, I’d simply have to imagine that it should already be doing what I want, but it doesn’t. It attempts to always put in user_nicename.

It’s very confusing. It’s also very disappointing. BuddyPress seemed to have promise for a few applications at my university, but I’m not going to be able to use it effectively without being able to use usernames that essentially look like emails (they would be Shibboleth eppns).

I don’t get it, why is BuddyPress such a pain about usernames? If BuddyPress is a WordPress Mu plugin, it should work with any username that is valid in WordPress… I can only assume this is some kind of bug within BuddyPress itself, and I’ll continue treating it as such.

[zooney]

To anyone who happens upon this post in desperation…

After posting this issue in BuddyPress’s bug tracking system, I was informed that I needed to set:

define( ‘BP_ENABLE_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE’, true );

…in wp-config.php

This seemed to resolve some of the issues, but not all of them. For some reason BuddyPress’s theme still seems to be forming the incorrect URIs in some areas.

So, that may help in your case. I’ve actually reopened the issue to see if there’s anything further that can be done…