A few days ago I replied to topic https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/707188-looking-for-curve-fitting-algorithm-for-my-requirements/5427857/​​ by user “Iron-Warrior” (note the hyphen), joined in 2015, reputation 172.

When today I followed the link on the topic page to visit their profile https://www.gamedev.net/iron-warrior​ I got the profile of user “IronWarrior” (no hyphen), joined in 2007 and inactive since 2008, reputation 144, clearly someone else.

The same profile opens for the more reasonable URL​ https://www.gamedev.net/ironwarrior/ and I am unaware of any way to see Iron-Warrior's profile.

Why are usernames altered? Are hyphens specifically targeted, or is it a more GMail-like normalization?

Usernames are not altered.

Looks like another problem of legacy data. I'll take a look at what's happening in this instance.

khawk said:

Usernames are not altered.

Evidence:

• the topic page shows correct information
• the profile page URL matches the username
• the profile page content shows another user's information,

Clearly,

• the database has user information filed under the correct usernames
• user information queries for topic pages are OK
• while processing user information queries for profile pages the identifiers are deliberately altered before database accesses (or in equivalent situations, e.g. before access to some caching layer).

khawk said:
Looks like another problem of legacy data. I'll take a look at what's happening in this instance.

Considering old users and their data “legacy” isn't a very good attitude.

Yes, usernames need to be processed to a “slug” format. For example, some users have spaces, so a hyphen is typically inserted in that case.

LorenzoGatti said:
Considering old users and their data “legacy” isn't a very good attitude.

Okay, I'm not going to get into a semantics contest, but “legacy” data as in “legacy data format". The platform has gone through 5 or so backend transformations over its history with changes to the way data is handled or formatted. This one is complicated by the fact that one iteration of the platform allowed the same username to be used by multiple users (!).

Either way, the original problem was addressed already.