Adding users remotely? (Touches on integration)
 

Hi everyone,

The challenge I face is as follows:

• We aim to run a Members Only vBulletin forum for students of our academic institution.
• All of our student details are stored in a database on an off-site server. We cannot remotely query that database for security reasons.
• Students can logon to a 'Student Resource Center' on the off-site server with their credentials.
• We aim to provide a link to students in the 'Student Resource Center' which will create an account for them on our vBulletin installation.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we can achieve this?

I thought that the absolute simplest way would be to develop a script within the 'Student Resource Center' which would connect to our vBulletin database and insert a row in the user table, thus directly creating a user in the vBulletin database. How feasible is this?

The script could also pull fields from the student database to determine what groupid to give the user in vBulletin, what username to assign them, etc.

The last challenge is that we will need to verify and update all forum accounts on a regular basis (i.e. every week or every few days). This is for the following reasons:

• To make sure that un-enrolled students no longer have Members Only forum access.
• To update the groupid of forum users, which will change as the student progresses through their course.
• To update basic details such as email address, which might be changed by the user in the 'Student Resource Center' or by our student administration.

The above could most likely be done via a script which runs on the off-side server (triggered via cron or something similar).

Any suggestions would be most welcome!

Thank you.

If both scripts are coded in PHP, it would just require using the vBulletin User Datamanager to add a user and update them. You could code a script that runs through the database, verifying details (as a cron task), or alternatively, update the vBulletin live when changes happen.

Hi and thanks for your reply.

I did consider the datamanager option, but wouldn't it matter that the 'Student Resource Center' and the vBulletin are on two completely separate servers?

In that case, you will need to replicate what the datamanager does and I assure you, it does more than just adding a row in the user table.