Mini Mods - Custom Usernames

This is a very simple modification that involves a simple plug-in. I'm sure almost everyone already knows how to do this, but I've had a few people who are new to vBulletin ask me how to do this, so I thought I would post it up for other people like that to find.

With this plug-in, you can mask any user's username with a custom name. You can even have an image as a name.

Set the hook location to fetch_musername and use the following code:

PHP Code:

if ($user['userid']==1){
    $user['musername'] = "<b><i><u><font color=\"#005599\">AllenSam</font></u></i></b>";
} 


Change the 1 to the user's userid and change the html within the quotes to anything you want your name to be. To use an image you would put:

PHP Code:

if ($user['userid']==1){
    $user['musername'] = "<img src=\"imageurl.gif\" border=\"0\">";
} 


Make sure you add \'s before any quotes you use within the HTML, or it will result in an error. You can also use single quotes.

If you don't want to make a single plug-in for each user, you can put them all in the same plug-in like this:

PHP Code:

if ($user['userid']==1){
    $user['musername'] = "<b><i><u><font color=\"#005599\">AllenSam</font></u></i></b>";
}
if ($user['userid']==2){
    $user['musername'] = "<img src=\"imageurl.gif\" border=\"0\">";
}
if ($user['userid']==3){
    $user['musername'] = "<blink><sub>BillyBob</sub></blink>";
} 


[Spank]

^ I suppose so people can change their username and you can keep track of who everybody is.

[FreshFroot]

yeah, but there are addons to request or change usernames

As for keeping track? technically only admins would know, what the users unmasked name is..?

[corbin joshua]

Thanks Sammage, this is me - Nightmare!

[Chris M]

There was a Username History Mod that allowed Users to change their Username and it kept a History of the last x Usernames the user had, and had time limits etc built into it, but I'm not sure if it was updated to the latest vB version...

Just so you are aware, you will need to replace the "username" value with an unformatted version of the new username as well as the "musername" value, but to do that you will also need to change the location of where the plugin is activated

Chris

[AllenSam]

Originally Posted by FreshFroot

what's the point of masking a username? why not just change it?

Originally Posted by Spank

^ I suppose so people can change their username and you can keep track of who everybody is.

Originally Posted by FreshFroot

yeah, but there are addons to request or change usernames

As for keeping track? technically only admins would know, what the users unmasked name is..?

The point of this isn't to mask your username with another username, it's meant to allow users to use custom formatting or images. For example, instead having AllenSam, I could have AllenSam and someone with the username Zero could use this image as their username:

Originally Posted by Iskib

To bad there wasn't a mod that would let each user do this on there from usercp

Yeah, that's probably possible, but then people could abuse it and mask their name with stupid stuff and it would be hard to keep track of who everyone is, like everyone has been saying in previous posts.

[FreshFroot]

this hack reminds me of vbplaza... with the username changes to image or different formats.

[music legend]

any updates to this??

[Evolution06]

I think this is what Zero Tolerance uses on his site only with the bb code color.. Nice hack.

[Derek Chai]

So where do we put this? How do you add fonts etc..

[AllenSam]

You can use basic HTML to change the font and format.