I recently had an issue with Roles names containing a colon character. The symptom is that you won't be able to assign the Role to a module. After you update the permissions and review the settings again you won't find the Role assigned to the Module.

Also, I found out that Role names can contain a ","! and here is the error message:

Error: Edit Security Roles is currently unavailable.
DotNetNuke.Services.Exceptions.ModuleLoadException: The parameter 'roleName' must not contain commas. Parameter name: roleName ---> System.ArgumentException: The parameter 'roleName' must not contain commas. Parameter name: roleName at Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Security.SecUtility.CheckParameter(String& param, Boolean checkForNull, Boolean checkIfEmpty, Boolean checkForCommas, Int32 maxSize, String paramName) at Microsoft.ScalableHosting.Security.Roles.CreateRole(String roleName) at DotNetNuke.Security.Roles.RoleController.AddRole(RoleInfo objRoleInfo, Boolean SynchronizationMode) at DotNetNuke.Modules.Admin.Security.EditRoles.cmdUpdate_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) --- End of inner exception stack trace ---

Can we provide better error checking of special characters in Role Name and prevent the above ugly type error message!

This might also be of use to you... although, please note... it is not portal specific!

DECLARE @Old nvarchar(255)
DECLARE @New nvarchar(255)

SET @Old = 'old role name'
SET @New = 'new role name'

BEGIN TRAN
 update roles
  set rolename = @New where rolename = @Old
 
 update aspnet_roles
  set rolename = @New, loweredrolename = lower(@New)
  where rolename = @Old
COMMIT TRAN

Scott Willhite, Co-Founder DNN