When I finally got around to registering, I noticed that my usual username, Ben, had been taken already. Initially I thought registering with my full name would be fine. The space in my name was changed to an underscore. While the username was repeated again in the next page and email, many people will not notice the change.
I believe it would be best for usability to either allow spaces in usernames or give an error message for usernames with spaces, forcing the user to consciously change their username, most likely simply removing the space and adding an underscore. They will change the username themselves, putting the username to memory correctly.
If my memory serves, I remember reading something (perhaps and Alertbox column) about how one website automatically cut-off usernames after a certain amount of characters without telling the user. That is terrible usability and I can imagine how much of a problem it caused. I can compare this problem to that one, but this isn't anywhere near as bad.
Another small usability flaw I noticed was on the website in the poll. After I voted, I was not shown the poll results and had to read and click to view the results. While not terrible usability, we all come to expect the poll results shown after we vote. Some people won't figure out that you have to click another link and give up right there in my experience.
I also noticed a small spelling error on the features page:
QuoteUseBB uses seperated HTML and PHP for optimal performance
That stood out to me quite a bit. The correct spelling is separated.
Good job on the work so far! I look forward to the finished product.
