[isf-wifidog] case-sensitive usernames

[Dylan Reeve]

Benoit Grégoire wrote:
> On Friday 12 January 2007 21:29, Gabe Sawhney wrote:
>   
>> I thought I remembered seeing a discussion about this a while ago, but
>> couldn't find it in the archives.
>>
>> Usernames are case-sensitive, which has the unfortunate effect of
>> allowing "gabe" and "Gabe" (and, indeed, "gAbe") to be completely
>> seperate accounts.  Besides the obvious reason for why this might be
>> confusing, it's also awkward because most websites that require users
>> to create accounts aren't case-sensitive in this way.  (They'll
>> preserve the case of the username as it was entered, but it won't
>> allow two usernames which differ only in case.)
>>
>> Obviously there are probably already hundreds of these username case
>> conflicts in our database, but it'd be nice to prevent any new ones.
>>
>> Of course, maybe there's some advantage to this that I'm not seeing.
>> So is it a feature, or a bug?  <smile>
>>     
>
> Admittedly, whe should change that, but we need to code a reasonnable way to 
> transition, which is not that simple.
>   
The best way approach would be to make it configurable (defaulting to 
case-insensitive), which would allow those with existing case conflicts 
to continue, and perhaps migrate users to new usernames where necessary, 
while preventing the issue from being ongoing.

Alternatively, when checking usernames a case insensitive query can be 
made against the database, if more than one result is returned, case is 
compared by PHP, otherwise it's compared regardless of case. New 
registrations with only case differing from existing users would not be 
allowed.

Dylan


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