[Colin F]

Originally Posted by Johan Andersson

Hello.

I'm running a vbulletin with about 34,000 active members for a game-development company.

In order to make sure registered customers get better service, we were planning to give them access to a special forums. The idea I had was to give those people a special additional user-group that grants access.

The idea was to have them enter a "cd-key" thats provided with the box we ship, and then have some utility on the forum-server check a local database if it is a valid key and then grant them the additional usergroup.

Anyone got any hints for how to do it?

You might be able to do this by adding a custom profile field and checking hourly via a cron job if that is a valid key. Then again, while that would require no editing of files, I'm not sure how one would only check the users that updated it, meaning a bit of serverload...

Another way would be adding a custom check.

How are the cd-keys generated?
Is there an algorithm that can be used to check or would one have to check in the database?