strict validations for username?

[tmfelwu]

A user can signup with username "mean mean & mean" , shouldnt there be strict rules for username?

[ilanbiala]

Suggestions?

[tmfelwu]

1. start with alphabet
2. no spaces
3. alphanumeric, _ and .
4. limit length 3-100

[ilanbiala]

Is there any reason to limit it to that? What sorts of issues may we run into without these restrictions?

[mleanos]

From my perspective, I really wouldn't care what my User's use as a username. Just as long as my application can store it, and retrieve it.

Some of the apps that I've created, I actually forced my User's to use their email address as their username. This was more of a business rules consideration, and for ease of registration.

If you're not restricting to email addresses, then I say it's fair game as to what they can use as their username. Obviously, in a production environment you may want to prohibit offensive language/words. However, that's a whole other topic.

[tmfelwu]

@mleanos i am using username to generate profile urls for users xyz.com/username for that I had to restrict username in my app.

[lirantal]

@sparshy why not use an id for referencing the username instead of the plain username field from the database?

[codydaig]

You could also just Slugify the username for the url.

[tmfelwu]

@lirantal that wont be user friendly ,no user will remember his id
@codydaig a user expects his profile to open when he types xyz.com/username not the slugified version. look at any website twitter, fb, github all have strict rules for username.

also login feels bit weird with username with spaces. username : "mean mean"

[lirantal]

@sparshy if you're aiming for a website like about.me or twitter that really has your homepage and profile page use the username then I definitely agree, otherwise it doesn't make much sense. I don't remember my fb username nor do I use it ever.

I could argue that you could just move the /username part to be part of your logic and let users generate this based on nickname availability rather than force the username for this.

I still think that forcing a strict username schema in meanjs at this point (without showing any real value for it) doesn't make sense. If it were up to me I'd want to completely remove the username field and just use emails to login.

[lirantal]

Since no traction on this thread I'll close it up.
@sparshy you're welcome to update us with your progress on this one.

[hyperreality]

I'd like to chime in here and say that I was caught out by the default behaviour of the username field.

I have become accustomed to usernames not containing spaces nor symbol characters because that is the default on 99% of websites out there. My assumption was reinforced by the fact that my usernames were automatically converted to lowercase per #866 .

I built a route using a :username parameter and it was only a week later when testing my project that I realised it was possible to enter absolutely anything, including spaces, symbols, even Chinese characters into the username field and this broke stuff.

I can understand why you want to keep options open regarding the username field and allow people to add restrictions only if necessary. But in my case I was tripped up because the username field did not behave how I expected it to - normally you are allowed to type anything you like into the first and last name fields, but certainly not into the username field! Perhaps we should just add a warning to the documentation, or even remove the username field altogether according to @lirantal 's suggestion so people implement it properly themselves