This has always baffled me, I understand the concept of “pretty URLs” yet cannot grasp how I can implement this without potentially obstructing the layout of my site.
I understand that I can just not allow people to have usernames like “messages” so it won’t interfere with a /messages page, however I have no idea what types of pages I’ll be adding to my site later… So for example if I wanted to have mysite.com/hub/ (I’m not a fan of hub.mysite.com) and someone registered the name “hub” what can I do about that? Am I just screwed at this point, needing to either rename it or force the user to change their name? If anyone can give me advice about how I should properly go about this I’d very much appreciate it.
I also see this method as being problematic. Instead of mysite.com/some-user, how about mysite.com/users/some-user? That way they can’t interfere with the rest of your site.