[Snowhog]

No need to be sorry. It is difficult to effectively communicate via posts.

Am I conveying my concern sufficiently well? IF someone knows your user name, which in vBulletin, is your registered account name, then a hacker already has half of what they need to attempt a takeover of that account. All they need to do is figure out the password.

In what I'm suggesting, this would be impossible, as no one viewing the forum and seeing who's online would know what the registered account user names were. In that case, they don't know both things required to takeover an account.