Unfortunately, writing some custom code is beyond me. The question is, is bbPress converting the username or is it WP?
I just tried creating a user called “1 2 3” directly through WP and it converted the usersname to “1-2-3”.
Creating a username is pretty much the first interaction that people have with bbPress and the way it’s set up now there’s a highly probability of a problem. Even if they try to use a name like “John Smith” it’s not going to work. They’ll be unable to log in and most likely will give up and go away.
I just imported a phpBB forum of 2000 members and 100,000 posts. I was getting an error that MySQL died so I changed a couple of settings in my.cnf to keep the connection alive. You can also change the default wait time in the importer from 1 to 3 to give everything time to catch up.
Unfortunately, the forums get imported in seemingly random order so you’ll have to edit each forum and use the Order field to display them properly.
If you’ve already run the importer once, check to see if you’ve already imported the members. Clearing the previous attempt doesn’t clear the members you imported, only the forum data. So if you run the entire import again you’ll get duplicate usernames (like Joe and ImportedJoe) and all the forum links will be wrong. I used a plugin in that lets you mass delete members, and then started over from scratch. Honestly, it took me several times to get it right.
I recently installed Buddypress and BBpress and was thinking about how I could add all the nifty features of phpBB such as BBcodes and stuff. Then I remembered that hardly anyone uses most of them and here’s a big reality check – Facebook doesn’t even let you use bold or italic and they have a BILLION users.
Bottom line – don’t waste time adding a bunch of stuff that you think might be cool but actually have little or no effect on activity.
