How to integrate existing user database into vBulletin database?
 

Hi all,

I have a website and it presently has a few thousand registered users in mysql database.

We would like to seek advice on how we should integrate the forum into our website with minimum inconvenience to the existing registered users.

In other words, they do not have to register a separate account for the forum. And for new users, one account will allow them to utilise both our website features and vbulletin forum.

Can someone please advise the proper steps and measures to take for the transition?

Thank you.

Integrating the vBulletin user and permission system into your custom pages would be the easiest. If you can create a textfile with usernames and email addresses, then you can use ImpEx to load the current users into vBulletin. ImpEx is available free of charge to our customers.

Hi Marco,

I believe what you had mentioned is a one-time process of copying users to vbulletin database.

1. What happens when a new user register at the forum and not our website first? What should be the set of procedures to adhere at the programming side?

2. What if the user login at our website and then access the forum, how will they be automatically detected as logon in the forum also?

Thank you.

My advise is based on an integration of the vBulletin user system in your custom website application. This proofed the easiest and most flexible solution in most similar scenario's. To initially load your existing users into vBulletin, you would need to do a 1 time import.

1. Regstration of new users should go directly into the vBulletin. It is possible to create a registration from both the forums or your custom pages.

2. If the site is setup corretly, the cookie/session set by a login would work on both the forums and your custom pages.

PS Integrating the vBulletin framework into your custom pages is something that will require some PHP knowledge. In most situations this should however not be overcomplicated.

Hi Marco,
Can you provide me with some sites that have such similiar integrations? So that I will know how it is going to be like ...

Thanks.

There are many sites that integrate custom parts of their website with vBulletin. I don't have any examples avaialbe however, maybe some members can help you out with this.

My example would be vBDrupal: www.vbdrupal.org

Macro, I have a forum and a script using the id (userid for forum and uid for the other script) When we started off, the userid and uid are the same (for both scripts to work) now they are out of synch (for some reasons).

Is there a script to re-assign forum's userid to a new userid along with their own threads and all the stuff related (linked) to userid? Can the import script do that?

Thanks,
CK

Please ask such questions in the appropriate support forum.

But the short answer is: No, don't even try it.