Automatic Forum Generation

[bdunbar]

New vbulletin admin here. If this post belongs elsewhere, let me know, please. All other advice cheerfully accepted.

It's possible (it's hoped for at least) that the demand for forum creation on my board will exceed our ability to manually enter the information by hand; for example I know that I'll need to at least;

- Add X number of forums on command, via script.

- Add Users that can utilize these forums, again via script.

The process should be like so: Abe signs up for our service. He clicks 'submit', and seconds later he has a private forum for his group, Bob and Charlene. If Abe has to wait for an overworked (and at this point underpaid) admin to manually create the forum, he's not going to be a happy client ....

On the backend what I envision is the login request dumping to an xml or text file, and the script taking _that_ and creating the forums, then emailing success or failure. Of course being a proactive admin I'd have all the activity logged.

I can't be the first guy to need something like this - but I've searched the both the .com and .org forums. I'm sure it's not (hah) difficult (in theory) . . .

brian dunbar
brian.dunbar@plexus.com

[Rampag33]

I would think this would be pretty easy to do. But I think they would have to have access to the admin dir since the commands are in that section. Have you tried looking at Zajako VB-DOS hacc as well.

[gmarik]

The dos hack is really great, but this seems CRON to me.

P.S. It would cool to have a hack:
1) That shows all the POLLS over the board
2) Generates a .txt file by demand with download links and names, so I can download them later with a download manager, for example, "Mass Downloader 2.5" or any other.

[bdunbar]

Rampag33
"I would think this would be pretty easy to do. But I think they would have to have access to the admin dir since the commands are in that section"

The user creating the forums would not (or at least I wouldn't let a user have that access) - the idea is that the user submits information when he logs in, the information is taken by a script and used to generate his forum(s) and it's setup. The script is run by a system userid with no other function.

Is there a reference for the php scripts in the /admin directory?

gmarik
"The dos hack is really great, but this seems CRON to me."

Indeed - either cron would run the script every X minutes looking for the 'run me' flag or the script would be initiated by the user submitting the information.