MyBB Community Forums

The way we specify disallowed usernames and emails needs to be improved by including at least some basic regular expression functionality:
1. Word Boundaries. For example, I want to disallow the word sex, but allow sexton
2. Start and end of string. For example, StopForumSpam shows a ton of spammers using short usernames (including just the single letter a). I want to disallow these, while allowing longer usernames.
3. Allow us to disallow the * character. StopForumSpam shows that spammers provide an email address of one or more asterisks at gmail.com. Our email checker reads an asterisk as zero or more characters, so I can't add this filter to disallowed list.

1) If I recall correctly, Woltlab Burning Board 1 and 2 both had ways to define what to filter.
Using {word} would filter "word" but not "words" and word* would filter anything that contained "word" and whatever the next character is. I'm surprised the first type wasn't already part of the filter system to avoid filtering a part of a word like you described (sex in sexton would be ***ton). I think it would be great to make the filter system a little more powerful in how it filters words.

Another thing I'd want to disable is a username only containing digits, or being comprised solely of the same character repeated multiple times.