[Siraris]

OK, after doing a lot of thinking, I definitely need to integrate the two, let me post my thoughts and maybe someone can help me sort them out and tell me the right direction to go. This is my first time ever using VBulletin as an admin, and it's a bit overwhelming. I hope my post here makes sense, I'm a big discombobulated.

I have a user register on my site, I collect the Username, pass, zipcode, gender, birthday, and that's it. I can then insert that data into the VBulletin forum.user table - although for some reason, I think I am still doing the PW generation incorrectly (I still can't find the salt that VBulletin uses to generate the password, and in the DB it has something like *4e for when I registered) - and insert it into my tblUser database as well.

Is this stupid? Should I just use the VBulletin user database? If I do that, can I just add on my own columns on there, and then replace any reference to my tblUser in my code to the vbulletins user db?

If I do that, and just use the vbulletin user DB, then everything is solved. If a user changes his PW, it is reflected on both my site and the forum without any messing around.

The thing I'm most worried about is messing with VBulletins code and breaking everything, since I don't know how exactly their system is designed, and I am much better at working with code I wrote than other peoples code.

Anyways, if I don't just move all my data over to their DB, and continue to use mine and theirs, it could turn out to be a nightmare, at least in my thinking.

The only other issue there is, when they login on the main site, they will need to be logging in to the messageboard, correct? At that point, it will create the necessary cookies for Vbulletin, and I can also reflect it in my session variables in my login script. Can I have it so that it logs in with my user forum, posts to the message board, logs in, and redirects back to my front page?

If so, that should be everything. Taking into that I am thinking about this as me putting all my data into the VBulletin user table, and using that for both sections, any change of a PW will reflect on both sites, it will register on my site, it will login through VBulletin, create all the necessary cookie data for vbulletin, then go back to my site where I will use the userID in the VBulletin cookie to get the data I need from my site, and complete the login.

Please help!