Ran into an Issue…

I was testing my business directory site before going live or advertising it and ran into an issue. I am using the latest responsive business directory theme.

I created a few free listings using the setting where anyone can create a listing without being registered first. So my main concern was usernames. I wanted to know if usernames were case sensitive, and I wanted to know what happens when a user creates an account with the username “admin”, “administrator” etc. I was sure that those usernames would be allowed without a restricting plugin of some sort and I was correct. And this is fine as long as I, the real admin, can moderate that and at least change their display name so that it doesn’t show “admin”, which I found that it is very simple.

Now while testing all kinds of usernames, I found an issue…
When you try to create a new listing and use an existing username, ex “admin” which I had used earlier to create another test listing, you will get an error telling you that the username already exist.

NOTE: Make sure that “display errors” is set to “Off” in php/php.ini or else some critical info will be displayed by a php error at the top of the page when this happens.

Issue: Even though there was an error when I tried to submit my listing telling me the username was already being used, thus not automatically registering me, the listing was still submitted. It was pending with as an admin listing (the real admin). This happened on all 6 different occasions that I tried it.

This can be a problem if a lot of listings get submitted this way accidentally using an existing username. There will be many false, unusable listings that will have to manually be deleted by an admin.

I haven’t tested on paid listings but I’m sure it would probably be the same.

Has anyone else confirmed this?