Need general direction for unique project.

[DPrueitt]

I am completely new to VBulletin, but very experienced coding both C and PHP (the C is important for the other side of my project).

I do plan to fully RTFM but hope you can point me in the right direction, so much VB stuff to read.

Basically, I run a very popular text based game (MUD) that has in-game forums, also text based. I plan to put VB up as a web-based forum, but want it integrated into the game such that:

1. Whenever a user creates in the game, they automatically get an account on the forum with the same username and password. Basically, creating a VB forum user from an external source.

2. Whenever a post is made in the game, it also posts to the web forum. So, adding posts to the VBforum from an external source and triggers new VB posts to call an external routine.

3. Whenever a user is banned from the game, they are also banned from the forum.

4. The initial setup for this will involve a mass load of users into VB of existing players on the game.

5. The in-game forum already has over a 1.5 million posts going back as far as 1996. I would like to write an import tool to mass-upload these. Is reading the impex source basically the best place to start?

The current user data is in "player files", a single text based pfile for each user, but if it makes the whole process simpler I can easily convert this to a SQL profile for information the forum software would be interested in.

Other stuff such as adding VB profile fields to suit ingame data seems straightforward enough based on the vb manual chapters I already read, but I guess I'm in "hack" territory with some of the other stuff above.

Thanks for reading!

Derek.