[ WANTED ] - Sign up for free forum hack

Hello,

I'm looking for a developer to create a hack for me. I would be willing to pay.

It would allow users to sign up for a free forum on our site. If inactive for over x amount of days it would delete the forum.

Email me at info@virtuetech.com

Thanks. :)

Sorry can't help you VirtueTech.

I'd just like to add that I, too would be willing to pay for a hack like this.

There are two problems here:

First, is the sign up for a free forum. I would take that to mean that whoever signs up would get admin priviliges and all that stuff? Basically their own little forum world.

What you need to do is have a form, that when its submitted, the PHP3 code creates the entries in the VB control tables to accomplish this. (Not having seen them, I don't know exactly what they are...) This give a person control of a forum. The code would also likely need to create a directory, copy some files, and so on.

Unless I'm missing my guess, it should be relatively straight-foreward. I think the biggest pain here is the analysis to find out WHAT needs to be set and where.

Problem two, is detecting inactivity. This would be a process that could either be run as a task by the system (say 2 AM?) or by an admin that would basically scan your forums list for posts and build a list of things to delete.

Once it had that list, it would then procede to undo what process #1 essentially did. Or if you had put each forum in its own database, the delete becomes idiot simple. Just zap the database and remove the directory structure.

Both of these likely could be helped along tremendously by examining the VBulletin install script and could possibly even be modeled from it.

Hope this helps. If I had a live VBulletin running, I might be able to take a look at this for you guys.

The more I think about this, the more simple it seems and the more useful. ALl you really would need to do is create a new forum and create a moderator with the username/password of the user's account.

Deleting would just require searching for the most receent post and if that post is more than X days old, delete all posts. Obviously that could make problems if someone just has an old board but that's how I would do it (maybe give users 30 or 60 or even 90 days for a receent post).

The hardest thing I can think of would be allowing users to customize the templates for their forum. All the other moderator features are pretty much built in to the actual threads so all of those should work fine.

I've begun to implement this sort to use vB as the guestbook system for our users. All I've done (works, but not debugged fully yet) is hack the files that create a forum to pass the users parameter and created a new version of the files for creating and displaying new threads so that they use a different template. The one thing I still want to do is make that user the moderator and assign priveliges, however, vB has a pretty funky users and groups setup that I haven't wanted to dig into. Also, I am still investigating where in the database to keep some of this info.
I'll keep you all updated once I get back on it.