I was wondering if it would be possible to do the following via a Hack:

The majority of the posters who will be using my board will have multiple accounts (some people as many as thirty, but about 5 on average).

Would there be a way to allow a poster to select which account they wish to post from, via a drop down menu at the reply screen? This would save them the trouble of constantly logging in and out.

but whats the reason for having more than one account?

Well, the community has a large number of posters who Roleplay: Each account represents an individual character, and they use their multiple characters to tell a story.

makes sense :)

very nice to use vB for such thing.

:) There are other sections to the board, but the Roleplayers have been a long standing and very large portion of the community. We've been using Ezboard to roleplay for two years now, amd now we've all decided it's time to move on to a more reliable system.

Anyway... I was discussing this idea with a SysAdmin, and he thinks it's very feasible. Although I don't know anything about making vB hacks, the two of us would be willing to lend our assistance where needed. In fact, if someone can do this, I'd be willing to pay cash for such a feature.

Well, i wuldn't know how to implement this, but back when we were using UBB, it was easy.

Just have all your accounts have the same password... then you could edit the username field on every post, since UBB didn't use a login function.

*shrug*

Well, I don't believe that's possible with vB. That used to be what we did with earlier versions of Ezboard, too; Until they decided that having the password at the reply screen was somehow unsafe.

What if instead of more than one account, you hacked it so that one account could have many public names that the user could switch between?

This might be a bit easier.

Thinking out loud here - conceptually, you would need to add a new dropdown to the profile, and have checks to validate any new public name created for uniqueness.

Then, it would be a matter of hacking your board to show public names, and not login names.

The posting forms would also need to be changed to contain the dropdown boxes of public names. By default, the login name would be there.

It would be an extensive hack, but I think it's probably doable.

Amy

That's very close to what we had in mind. I'm afraid that I know zip about making hacks, though. Like I said: If anyone can do this, I'd be willing to pay them for their work.

I know it's in poor taste to bump your own thread (especially multiple times) but this is very important to me. :)