Username Email Protection Plugins
 

Username Email Protection plugin for vBulletin 3.6.x is a set of plugins by Brett Brewer to obfuscate any usernames that contain email addresses, so that everything after the "@" symbol will be stripped out of the displayed name in the vBulletin frontend. This should help keep your users who use their email address as their login name from falling victim to spammers.

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Release Notes
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This product was developed on vBulletin 3.6.0 and appears to still work
fine on v3.6.4. Please let me know if you have any problems or discover that I've missed any places where a username should be obfuscated and I will write additional plugins to address it.

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IMPORTANT PRE-INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
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Before you install the product XML file, you'll need to add one hook to your showthread.php file. I have requested that this hook be added to the official vBulletin release, but have no idea if they will add it or not. The hook may be unnecessarry if there's another way to rewrite the javascript array with existing hooks, but I haven't found a better way so far. Feel free to improve this mod if you can and let me know about it, rather than forking this product.

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Open: /showthread.php
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Find:

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Change to:

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End of file modifications
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Just upload the changed file to your server and install the product-username_email_protection.xml file via the Plugins & Products control panel in the admin cp.

Hi,

i see no differences in "Change to:" except the line:
//product-username_email_protection hook added by Brett Brewer

Regards, Stoebi

DOH! Thanks for pointing that out. The first code block isn't supposed to have that hook in it, that's the part that's supposed to be added in the second block, along with the comment line. I can't seem to figure out how to edit the first post of this thread to fix the problem, but I will try to upload a new version of the zip file so at least the install.txt file will have the proper instructions.

[EDIT] HA! I just figured out how to edit the first post, so I uploaded a new zip and changed the instructions above. Thanks again for letting me know. This is my first attempt at releasing a vBulletin mod, so please bear with me while I learn how to properly release a product.

Awesome, this may come in handy since i have a few of these users roaming my boards constantly requesting name changes

If you install the mod, please check the various parts of your forums to make sure it's working properly. I have many of my own board features disabled, and I'm not making use of any polls, so I suspect that I may have missed a few places that usernames may need to be obfuscated. I will do my best to make speedy updates if anyone finds things I've missed.

Wow I thank you for this! :)

nice things...
can it works on email id posted in a thread or post too?
so that when any one will post mail id in a post or thread e-mail id will be changd to..and spammers or e-mail harvesting bot cant grab mail id too..

plz give a thought on it...

thnx

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking, but if you clarify, I will be happy to look into it. Is there a specific page that email addresses are still showing up on? If you give me an example I will try to find the right place to add another plugin for it.

can you not just prevent @ and .com .co.uk .something being allowed by setting them as illegal characters for usernames or am I missing something?

Probably, but that's really not the point of this plugin. I don't want to stop users from using their email address as their login name because many people like to do that and it makes it easier to integrate the VBulletin user database with the rest of our applications. So using these plugins you can just hide the part of their name that would reveal their email address to the public. I may enhance this plugin to allow you to specify alternate formats, such as simply rewriting the "@" to be "_at_" like some boards do, but that's obviously not going to stop a spammer from harvesting adrresses, so for now, I'm just focusing on completely hiding all email addresses on public pages.