Thread

Heya…

I’d like to be able to create usernames / screen names for admins / moderators that have a reserved word in them—like SitenameFred—and bar other members from creating usernames and screen names that contain the reserved word (Sitename).

All accounts need to be free to sign up without admin approval…

I was hoping to find a feature or add-on that would cover this, but no joy so far.

Anyone?

TIA!

Hi Bob,

Try this 😉

Go to :

Admin->Members and Groups->User Banning

On the right-hand side and down a bit you should see Restricted Usernames and Restricted Screen Names sections. This should do what you need.

You can create the admin accounts first with whatever names you want and then add in those parts and anyone can sign up with those checks in place. Not too sure if with those checks in place whether you can still create admin accounts yourself as a Super Admin containing those words but a quick check will let you know on that one. 😉

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hey, Mark!

Ah! There it is. Thanks!

One thing I’ll need to test is the ability to use wildcards. Email address Banning and IP banning use it, but the docs don’t mention whether you can use stuff like restrictedname* or *restrictedname*.

Let’s test… Okay, the verdict is: Yes, wildcarding works! Unfortunately, the banning also stops SuperAdmins.

Seems to me that this latter behavior should be changed to allow special staff names. I shall appeal to the authorities.

Thanks again!

Hi Bob. Glad it works for you. Note in my post above that I said that you could create the usernames / accounts you want for the admin accounts first and then add those names into the banned usernames section afterwards. I think that should work then maybe?

Best wishes,

Mark

Yep, that would work at first, but over time I’ll need to add new admins. And since I don’t know the first names of those folks yet (like the “Fred” in SitenameFred), I’d need to switch off and on again. I suppose I could create pseudonyms for a slew of admins in advance, but I’d prefer to allow them to use their own names.

Thanks again!

Hopefully your FR gets noticed as I can see how this would be a very good feature to allow Super Admins to have full control at any point. Haven’t tried it and don’t know if maybe you create a username first and then ban it if that creates any problems at a later date though so maybe that’s why Super Admins can’t do it at the moment. The dev team or perhaps support staff would know more about that though.

Hope you get it all working as you need soon though.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hopefully your FR gets noticed as I can see how this would be a very good feature to allow Super Admins to have full control at any point.

Hear, hear!

Haven’t tried it and don’t know if maybe you create a username first and then ban it if that creates any problems at a later date though so maybe that’s why Super Admins can’t do it at the moment. The dev team or perhaps support staff would know more about that though.

Oh, yeah… I forgot to mention that I already had one username created containing a restricted string, and it hasn’t seemed to damage functionality so far. I can log in as that user and do various things, even though creation of a new username with the string is prohibited. Haven’t actually tried to post under that name yet, but I would imagine that if EE doesn’t object to the login, it should be fine.

Excellent news that it all works. Hope that feature request is taken into account though as it does appear to be something that is definitely needed.

Best wishes,

Mark