Manual:$wgInvalidUsernameCharacters

User accounts, authentication: $wgInvalidUsernameCharacters
Characters to prevent during new account creations.
Introduced in version:	1.15.0 (r48765)
Removed in version:	Still in use
Allowed values:	(string)
Default value:	'@:>=' (1.40+, git #78b03385) '@:>' (1.39+, git #9d458f6d) '@:' (1.26-1.38, git #9aa5cd1b) '@' (1.15-1.25)
Other settings: Alphabetical | By function

Details

Characters to prevent during new account creations. This does not affect any existing user accounts.

The @ sign is prohibited by default, because MediaWiki uses it internally for users that have their account in another wiki (interwiki users). The : sign is prohibited because the validity of usernames in different wikis differs due to different namespace and interwiki configuration. If you allow the "@" in usernames, you should also set $wgUserrightsInterwikiDelimiter . Otherwise you won't be able to give users with an "@" in the username different permissions using the normal way (though permissions can still be set via user ID). However, you are free to allow the ":" in usernames as long as you don't run multiple wikis with shared database or Extension:CentralAuth , and you don't create new namespace or interwiki prefixes which make existing username invalid.

This is used in a regular expression character class during registration (regex metacharacters like / are escaped).

Apart from checking for the signs given in $wgInvalidUsernameCharacters, MediaWiki also checks other conditions, which can prevent a username from being allowed. For example IP addresses cannot be used as usernames and combinations of characters, which are not allowed in page names cannot be used either. More information is at Manual:Page naming.

The matchPattern and genPattern regular expressions in $wgAutoCreateTempUser will further restrict available usernames.

Example

In case user names containing several characters should be prevented, the following setting is used:

$wgInvalidUsernameCharacters = '@:>=#€';

Make sure that you always include the characters MediaWiki recommends to include by default.

See also

• Manual:$wgUserrightsInterwikiDelimiter
• Manual:$wgCapitalLinks and Manual:$wgCapitalLinkOverrides don't apply to usernames
• Manual:Page naming