UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support Changing Login Name

Greetings.

I am using 6.72
One of my users misspelled her first name (which is part of her login name). She left out an "l" in Elizabeth and kept forgetting how to mispell her name correctly to login.

I read here in a post dating from March 05 that manually editing user data is a bad idea, but it didn't say why.

I edited the user's record (i.e. 00000048.cgi) and "memberslist.cgi"

It works.

Now, having done this, why is it bad?

Not being a smart aleck, just want to know.

Thanks -

David Clark
Cochran, Ga.

There is no "prebuilt" way of changing the login name... You should also note that, I believe, any posts are assigned by login name so if you where to update the login name the users posts woudln't be associated with her account.

You should instead update their publicly displayed name to be the proper information, this is good from both a security and maintenance standpoint as it'd be more difficult for someone trying to break into this users account as they'd be trying to login with a user account that wasn't valid and it'd be the easiest route to work with...

You can easily allow the user to update their display name from the control panel (or use a modification from UBBDev which would allow you to update the PDN from the controlpanel).

Hello and thank you for the reply.

This particular user had not posted as of yet, so losing posts is no problem.

The question is, though -- having modifed the actual data as I have done, is that a problem? It seems to work fine, but I'm asking if there is something I don't know about.

Thanks --
David Clark
Cochran, Ga.

It can have reoccouring issues, no one file contains the users login data, there are numerous files which need updated... Why not just delete the user and recreate the account?

Well, see my other topic about deleting users.

I only found two files that listed the login name after looking through all the files in the members folder.

But -- I trust you.

I can have the lady use a different name I suppose, but this would seem to be something easily done, though obviously it must not be.

Hard to imagine that I would be the first person to have this situation.

David Clark
Cochran, Ga.