[Natch]

I had a chat with a mod_rewrite expert last night at my local PHP User Group meeting: suggestion from there was to write a small redirect script (uanmeparse.php) to parse the username to userid, then redirect to forumhome/member.php?u=$userid, and then mod_rewrite like so:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteRule ^~([a-z0-9]*)$ unameparse.php?un=$1 [L,NC]

Then, your unameparse.php goes in serverroot, along with .htaccess, and you call http://www.yourdomain.com/~username =>> this would redirect to the user's profile...