FluxBB username mods

May 26, 2011 (about 11 months ago)

I like FluxBB, I like it a lot. It has clean, easily hackable code and an active community, but best of all, it has huge potential. This potential is evident by how the FluxBB developers have tightly integrated their own forums into the rest of their website. The integration is seamless and very slick.

Having been thoroughly impressed by the FluxBB website, I spent some time over the last couple of nights playing around with the FluxBB codebase, trying to familiarise myself with how it works. While I was experimenting with it, I wrote a couple of simple modifications for the user registrations system. I submitted the mods to the FluxBB mods repository and they got accepted. I am not sure they will be overly useful to most FluxBB administrators, but I have been looking at how it is possible to integrate the forums into services running on the host machine and I thought the modifications would come in handy.

The first mod adds a list of reserved usernames, which is used to validate the usernames of new registrations. I thought this would be useful to stop users from registering names such as ‘root’, ‘administrator’, ‘www-data’ etc. See FluxBB reserved usernames for more details.

The second mod tries to ensure users only register names that are safe to integrate into system services, such as mail servers. See FluxBB safe usernames for more details.

In totally unrelated news, there is something really rather exciting happening in Lincoln, UK. I cannot divulge any details at the moment, other than that I am really hoping to be a part of it. Exciting times ahead, possibly. :)

Tagged with: fluxbb, php