[kh99]

I don't know what the recommended solution is (or if there is a recommended solution). All I know is a little bit about the problem. To get someone logged in to vbulletin, you need to get it to create a session and save some cookies (you *can* log in without cookies enabled, but "remember me" won't work, and if someone does have cookies enabled then I'm not sure you could also log in without cookies). And part of the cookie problem is that the user's browser has to save it and send it back when requesting a forum page. Also, a session has to have a constant ip and user agent. So I don't know that there's any way to fake all that using cURL (but you said you think it used to work, so maybe there's a way I don't know about).

So given all that, it kind of seems like the only way to do it would be to get the user's browser to send the user name and password to the vbulletin login script, or else hack vbulletin to allow some other way.