In example "JAB Creations" and "jabcreations" are essentially the same thing though I want to prevent this to preserve the uniqueness of each user name.
I've considered creating a new case sensitive column to store the letter casing and spaces in a user name separate of the base user name.
So in example if I registered as "JAB Creations" that user name would be stored in the case sensitive/space allowed column. Additionally I'd use PHP to set all the letters to lower case and strip the spaces storing it in a sort of "base" user name column. The case sensitive user names are restricted to alphanumeric character and spaces.
I'm interested in thoughts of improvements or different approaches to this goal.