Dennis's Blog

Moodle Usernames

Recently, the company I work for was using Moodle for their LMS, and we have an activations service that would run and check our storefront database API for purchases. Everything had been going well for about 6 months when, for apparently no reason, the system started to fail while one of my coworkers was running a few test purchases.

Code change in the activation code? Nope.
Moodle upgrade? Nope.

When I looked at the email address being used, it was one of Google's specially formatted emails: user.name+004@gmail.com

This was the culprit, as Moodle by default does not allow special chars except underscores, hyphens, periods, and at symbols. This was disconcerting, because I started to wonder if I was going to have to build in handling for those special email cases.

Remember when I said "by default" earlier? Well that's because if you navigate to: Site administration > Security > Site security settings you'll arrive at an options page a mile long. Find Allow extended characters in usernames and enable this feature, and save.

This will give you better flexibility in creating usernames.

N.B. This does NOT allow username to be uppercased.

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I'm a software developer, philanthropist, biker, cyclist, hiker, gamer, drone pilot, photo bug, and all around DIY enthusiast. I like to think I can cook, and enjoy a good game of PUBG/WarZone every now and then.

Yell at me on twitter, github, and at home. Typically present with the handle @dengsauve on most sites.