create a bunch of bogus users

[monotreme]

Thank you mod for moving this thread to correct forum...

just received a package called ImpEx. It has reverse engineered descriptors for about 50 other BB systems, and tries to set up so you can do a clean import from about any other board you can think of into vb. Unfortunately it does not include what I need which is the generator to generate descriptor of custom data. I guess you can get this if you have a license because it has our licence number embedded it and is written by vb. Don't ask me where you get it because I don't know. perhaps vb.com??? And sorry about posting in the wrong forum. I had mouse all poised then something happen to interrupt and it got bumped. Before you come down on me hard please keep in mind not all are blessed with 20/20 vision.

[monotreme]

I hacked about 500 users from a proprietery system into vbulletin by simply creating records for them in the user table and stuffing them with reasonable values when there was no correspond in the old table. But there's something i obviously failed to set up because the "legit" users can't send pms to them. I get a database error thus

Invalid SQL:
INSERT INTO vb_pm (pmtextid, userid) VALUES (532, );

the missing value is supposed to be their userid, which does exist in the user table and is correct. but it needs to be somewhere else. Reading vb code is rather excrutiating. What little relation table did I overlook please?

[Talisman]

I'm not quite sure either, Monotreme... but I'd browse through all the related tables for usergroup settings and permissions. Your bogus membership may have defaulted in with PM permission set to NO.

[monotreme]

If I had mistakenly imported their settings to no pms' then the system just wouldn't send pms to them. As things were it was "crashing", well spitting out bad database query. I deliberately used the settings bitmap from a legit user whom I verified could receive pms.

But I did find the answer at least to the current problem...

it's usertextfield. you gotta create an entry in that for every user. everything can be null but you just gotta have it. I made one for a particular bogus user and now I can send pms to her. So now I'll create an entry for any the newly hacked in users that doesn't have one and then see what other problems crop up until these hacked-in guys become full vb citizens.

It was actually surprisingly simple as long as you don't have posting history to port along with them. The proprietry system I was exporting from was not a discussion forum and did not have postings.

I'll sit on this a while longer until I'm sure there aren't any other creeping nastys in it then I'll share it. The script assumes mysql 4.1 or better tho, sorry I just can't live iwth 4.0