Usernames are transformed into Title objects as part of the signon process.
I presume this is to ensure that "User:username" makes a valid page title.
As part of that process, it appears to me from ll. 1276-1279 in Title.php
that leading and trailing underscores are prevented from being in MediaWiki
usernames:
# Clean up whitespace
#
$t = preg_replace( '/[ _]+/', '_', $this->mDbkeyform );
$t = trim( $t, '_' );
We are doing authentication via an external university-wide Active Directory
system. Though we now do not permit new usernames which begin with "_",
there are 2 legacy names which do. We also have 38 usernames which have
trailing "_". [What possesses people to do this is beyond me, but that's
beside the point.]
Does anyone know of dire consequences if I replaces the lines above with
something like:
$t = trim ($this->mDbkeyform);
$t = strtr(t$,' ','_');
This would trim leading and trailing spaces, and convert embedded spaces to
underscores, but leave leading and trailing underscores untouched.
Thanks for any thoughts...
-- Joshua