[5001] SMF 2.1/2.0 Case sensitive usernames (russian) when login

[motechman]

Huh? "no reason for the username to be case INsensitive?" That's what you said, is that what you meant?

In my experience case SENSITIVITY is unusual for the username, but almost always required for password.


I misquoted you, I meant username not password above, which now reflects what you said.

[Arantor]

I said NO such thing. Please read my post again.

[Arantor]

I still think you misread my post.

If it's just normal ASCII characters, there is no reason for the username to be case sensitive and on stock 2.0.7 I have absolutely no trouble with that. The password, of course, must be case sensitive.

Point stands: it's run through strtolower(), password is added, whole thing run through SHA1. If there are normal ASCII characters in the username, there is no reason for the thing to be case sensitive.

[motechman]

My apologies. Corrected in previous post. I'm just trying to understand. It sounds like you're saying case sensitivity for usernames in SMF is the normal, correct behavior for an American English 2.07 installation of SMF.

Do I understand you correctly?

It's not a major problem, but it is an unusual design characteristic for login credentials in my experience. Just need to know if I need to:

a) inform my members
b) change SMF configuration (if that's possible), to make username for login case INsensitive.

[Arantor]

No, I'm not. NOT AT ALL. The main problem is that you're misinterpreting what I'm saying.

Case INSENSITIVITY is the norm. Always has been. Lower and upper case should not matter. It's explicitly pushed to lowercase internally regardless of whatever it was submitted as, since that's how the password hash is generated. From the LOWERCASE version. Making it case INsensitive.

The problem is for letters that are accented, where strtolower() will under some configurations and languages ignore the letters, e.g. Russian as per the original bug report.

There is no reason for simple ASCII letters to be treated as case sensitive. As in for the stated case it should work as you expect. And I have no idea why, off hand, it isn't, but this is really not helped by you trying to argue something that is wrong out of misinterpretations of what I'm saying.

[motechman]

OK, I am clear on what you're saying now, reading your post while I constructed mine.

My apologies for the misunderstanding.

Based on what your saying I need to file a bug report then, because I'm on a typical hosting account in the USA and am experiencing case sensitivity of usernames.

It may also be a hosting account issue. I will check with Siteground first before I file an SMF bug.

But I am confident in my testing methodology. My original post in this thread stands in terms of the problem I'm seeing.

Thanks for your help Arantor, and sorry for the misunderstandings.

Code Select Expand

Seems we have some funky communications going on here. I just went back and see you removed the in from insensitive in your earlier post, or I am just crazy 'cuz my last post is what I [think] I read.

No biggie, [u][b]if I misread your post I do sincerely apologize.[/b][/u]

And yet, I notice you're not actually stating what the correct behavior of SMF should be, but rather are stating if specific functions are used (I don't know what functions are used, and I suspect most reading this post won't either) the result would be case [b]IN[/b]sensitivity.

So I still don't have an answer to my question of whether usernames in SMF should be case sensitive or not.



[Arantor]

Well, since you're already here in the Bug Reports board on a related matter... another bug report isn't going to help...

What about installed modifications?

[Kindred]

and this "bug report" for US English would have to be an issue limited to your own site - thus based on some other mod that you installed, since I can confirm that 2.0.6 and 2.0.7 DO NOT care what case the user name is, if it is in standard ASCII characters.

[motechman]

and this "bug report" for US English would have to be an issue limited to your own site - thus based on some other mod that you installed, since I can confirm that 2.0.6 and 2.0.7 DO NOT care what case the user name is, if it is in standard ASCII characters.

That's good to know. Based on that the issue is probably the only mod I installed, httpBL version 2.5.1. I also installed and set the Anecdota theme to be the default. I wouldn't have thought either of those would impact username case sensitivity, but I haven't ruled them out either.

You qualified your statement with "if it is in standard ASCII characters". If the default language configured is English, can it be anything but ASCII characters? If so that is another possibility to investigate. How can I determine if an 8 bit or 16 bit character set is used? Is a 16 bit character set for the English language even a possible option in SMF 2.07? I get the distinct impression from you last post that isn't the case, and my site should be using an 8 bit ASCII character set, unless the Anecdota theme or httpBL mod changed it.

[Arantor]

Sure it can. ASCII defines the codepoints from 32 through to 127. There's still 128 above that even in a single byte, and that's before you get into the others.

As for 16 bit character set? That's old school. We long since exhausted that, which is why UTF-8 is so important, seeing how it scales from 1 to 4 bytes depending on situation.

By default, SMF will install with ISO-8859-1 as the character set which is a single byte character set containing some of the Western European accented characters; it is one of the typical foils for this.

However as we have repeatedly stated, you seem to be using the standard ASCII characters (those between 32 and 127) which would be correctly case folded by strtolower().

[motechman]

What do you suggest I check to isolate the problem? The log file doesn't provide any insight.

[Arantor]

Does it work if JavaScript is disabled?

[motechman]

I don't know. I never rely on anything that requires js to be disabled (except for perhaps TAILs / TOR).

Using my Mac I no longer see the problem, with or without js enabled, using either Firefox ver 29 or Safari.

So I fired up the linux box I noticed the problem on. Shoot me in the head, now the username case doesn't matter.

I can't explain it. I didn't believe it when I found the problem, verifying it by logging in at least 5 times. It was quite repeatable... until today!

Sorry to trouble you. 

[Arantor]

Not being funny but that's probably best because this was going to get painful in terms of debugging. Disabling JS wasn't about 'reliance' but the fact of how the password gets sent to the server (it's encrypted client side before sending)

But if you got it working for you, great.