Sorry, the programmer in me.
phpBB is written in PHP, and PHP is in turn written in C. The C programmin language has no operatives to do many things like work with files or in this case to compare strings; it uses library functions to provide those features and more. In the early C standard library there is function to compare strings and return a number based on which string comes first. The function is: int strcmp( char *s1, char *s2); It is case sensitive, there have been other functions to do the same that are not case sensitive such as, int strncasecmp( char *s1, char *s2, size_t n );
That is the C function that I assuming that
phpBB is using through the PHP interpreter.
Pangor