Strange Thread Title Graphics

[Justinphx]

These were posts made by a new user on our forum that were moderated. Does anyone here have any idea what the blue lines are? I have never seen anything like this and wondering how it was done and what could be the possible purpose for it?

[Dave]

Those are annoying unicode characters. I guess no other purpose than to be annoying.

[MarkFL]

I had a user use similar characters in my live chat once...I had to add code that would remove such characters. You can prevent this kind of thing by going to your settings and look for "User Registration Options" and then scroll down to "Username Regular Expression" and restrict the characters that can be in usernames.

[Justinphx]

Thanks for the insight. The poster used a normal user name and it was just the subject line that add the coding and inside the post. Is there a setting to block unicode in subject/titles and within posts?

[MarkFL]

There are none that I know of, other than custom coding.

[Dave]

You could change the character encoding globally, but that may mess up legitimate characters as well. A regex check to the thread title would be the easiest option, and with the least amount of false positives.