How to Set Up Tiered Model of Users Tied to Subsets of Features

[bkg]

What is involved in creating a tiered membership for vB fourm user groups if we want to divide existing users into 3-4 tiers depending upon any one specific criteria? Different users will have access to different tiers of features depending upon their tier status such as gold, silver, and platinum. These tiers could be set based upon number of posts and / or on some other subscription fee based criteria chosen by the forum owner. This approach seems to make sense as power users who happen to use most of the costly features are more expensive and cost more to maintain in terms of bandwidth, storage, and communication costs.

How would one manually change the members' group in a batch mode, say if you have to change the group of a few hundred or thousand members from a given group at a time? Say, if the change of group and related features is related to payment of a tiered subscription fee? Has someone tried to tie the membership status (group) to some subscription scheme? I recall having seen some prior discussions of vBulletin users who are using vB with payPal and other transaction schemes.

TIA

:glasses:

[Neo]

well to change a group of users to another group a easy query like

UPDATE user SET usergroupid='xx' WHERE usergroupid='XX'

but I dont really understand what you are getting at Oo

[bkg]

We want to set up membership groups with different groups able to access different subsets of vB forum features. The intent is to provide free basic functionality to all registered members while providing advanced vB functionality (PM,Calendar,Avatar,Private Forums, etc.) based upon paid membership status. By doing so, we can have members using most bandwidth and storage pay for those services. Currently, we have vB configured with only single registration status 'Registered' and we are planning to provide minimal basic vB functions for this without any fee. We plan to have many of these members (few hundreds to few thousand) upgrade to 'Premium' levels through an external payment scheme such as Paypal. Then we would need to change their registration group status to use the premium set of features for 'Premium' group.

What is the most efficient method for creating registration groups based upon different levels of fees (with base at 0) tied to different levels of vB features?

What is the best way for doing batch updates for doing membership upgrades from 'basic' to 'premium 'membership by exporting data from PayPal or Authorize.Net transactions?

Thanks in advance for your response.

[Dean C]

just simply upgrade a user to the new usergroup when they donate to the forum... and get a paid-membership...

then .... in each of your php files (dont quote me on this)... see if there is a line something like:

PHP Code:

if ($bbuserinfo[userid]<1) 
{show_nopermission();exit;} 


... if there is then try changing the 1 to the usergroup id for your paid members....

if there isn't try putting that code into the php file but replacing the 1 with the usergroup id for your paid members...

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Note: this is not tested by myself but its worth a try... but remember you will have to insert the usergroups id of your staff members including your admin usergroup id into that ...

and also there are lines in php files which already use the: show_nopermission thing....

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You might want to play around with this a lot on your test board instead of risking mucking up your normal board....