brettbrewer.com

Today marks my first vBulletin mod release since switching from phpBB to vBulletin on my work web site - the vBulletin Username Email Protection Plugins. You can find the installation files here:

 http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=130701

Mod Description

Some users and/or board admins prefer that people use their email address as their username for whatever reason. This opens up the possibility of spammers harvesting your users' email addresses and hurting your reputation as your users slowly discover that your board is responsible for their address getting spammed all the time. This mod will strip out the "@" and anything else after the "@" symbol in the display of any usernames that are formatted as email addresses. It does not use any kind of validation on the addresses to see if they are truly in valid email address format, it merely looks for any occurances of the "@" symbol and strips it and everything after it from the displayed username. It does not affect the actual usernames in any way and should not cause any problems with users recieving board emails. 

Somewhat Related Crap 

As an aside, I just wanted to rave about how much I like the vBulletin plugin architecture and the upgrade system. In fact, it's the whole reason I bothered to turn these mods into a public release and not just keep them to myself. I was hesitant to move to a commercial bulletin board system after using free ones for so long, but it has been worth every penny. If I were to have implemented this plugin in phpBB, it could have taken me days (actually it DID take me days) or weeks to upgrade the board and all the mods I made to it. With vBulletin, I literally installed the latest update (3.6.0 - 3.6.2) and had almost no worries about template and php file modification. I only ended up needing to re-edit a single PHP file after upgrading to account for a missing hook that I just HAD to have for my plugin to work. vBulletin also notified me about the 3 templates that had been updated in the latest release and told me whether I had to update my modded versions or not to account for new standard functionality. This board rocks! Hopefully they'll add my hook in an upcoming release and then it will be a completely hands-off install/upgrade for my plugins.