[makaiguy]

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

Is there any reason this must be based on a field in the profile, instead of just using Public Joinable Usergroup?

Heh heh. Now we're getting into the stuff I edited out of the original post to make it more concise ...

The bbs is an adjunct to an organization's existing website. People who have paid to join the organization receive a username and password that gets them into the members-only portions of the site. The password is changed periodically for security reasons.

I already do a comparison with the custom profile field value against a reference phrase set to the current org pwd and display their member status in postbits. When the organization password is updated, I just change the reference phrase value and folks aren't shown as members again until they update their profiles with the updated org. pwd.

The forum in question is to be reserved for organization members only. I've initially set this forum up to require a password, which I've set to the organization password. When the organization password is updated, we just update the forum password. This works, but I'd like to automate it so that organization members wouldn't have to enter the password every time they enter this forum.

Further, I'd like for the members to have to update the organization password in their profiles each time it's updated by the organization to weed out people that have not renewed their organization membership.

The organization is large enough that I don't want bbs staff to have to manually approve entry into a user group, For one thing the bbs staff does not have access to the organization's membership records, plus I don't want the members to have to wait for somebody to react to their request every time the org pwd is updated.

Maybe there's some other way to go about this that I haven't thought of (I'm very new to vB except as a user).

I've not yet looked into promotions. Could promotions somehow be used for this?

i.e. automatically promote users from Registered to Org_Member when they have the required value in fieldx?

if so, does this ratchet them permanently, or would they be demoted out of Org_Member when they no longer have the correct value in fieldx?