[nerbert]

With that new account ForceHSS suggested change the userid to your old one. If you are the first to register it will be 1 but maybe that's your old userid anyway.

If you can find someone to do the work here's what I think you need:

1. Build a new table called "restore_users" with userid and username fields

2. Query the post table and populate restore_users with usernames and userids from the posts.

3. Get the highest userid from restore_users and create an account with that number + 1 in the user table. I think this will force the next registered user to have a user id one higher than that (max + 2).

4. Create a query against the user table starting with userid = max + 2 that would take a username like JoeBlow_1, query restore_users for JoeBlow get the old userid, then change JoeBlow_1 to JoeBlow and the new userid to the old one from restore_users, then delete JoeBlow from restore_users. You would have to have some page with a button to run this last query and you could run it several times a day as your old users re-register. If I were better at mysql and wasn't busy with other projects I'd do it but like I said before , there are a lot of good coders here you could hire.