Restricting registrations to paid subscribers
 

Hi all! I've been hired to administrate a forum that's an adjunct to a subscription-based online service currently in development. The company wishes to restrict forum registration and viewing to paid subscribers of this online service -- sort of similar to the way the various vB sites check to see if you're a customer before allowing you to post, download and/or get support.

(At first I thought hey, we'll just password-protect the forums and give new subscribers the password in their "my account" area of the online service -- but then I realized that this wouldn't prevent smart alecks from giving out the password to friends/nonsubscribers!)

Any ideas on how this can be accomplished? A free hack would be ideal of course, but my bosses would probably accept a recommendation if something along these lines would require a paid programmer with vBulletin-expertise.

(Note that while our vb3 is on a *nix server, the online service is running on a separate ASP.NET server -- not sure if that matters but I thought I'd better mention it just in case!)

All ideas and help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks!

Well, how do you know these users are authentic? If it includes an email service, then only allow that email domain as valid. Or have each user use a unique key to register.

Otherwise if you need to pass data back and forth between the systems, that's probably a good use for XML... ;)