Master Board Idea

[mashby]

I run a small web site called InterPUG. The purpose of the site is to provide free hosting to Palm User Groups (PUGs) around the world. Little did I realize that putting this site was going to generate so much interest and so much NEED for me to baby their sites.

The reason I bring this up is because often times, people are looking for us to install a BBS for them and their members. In the past, we've installed a free bbs and that's worked ok, but it's become a bit of a management nightmare. If there's an update, it takes forever to try and get everyone's site updated, etc. since each install is unique. These groups need too much hand holding and would not take the time to even learn how vB works, much less hack or modify it.


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The Master Board Concept
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Each group is fairly small and doesn't have signifigant traffic, so a central board seems like the obvious choice. Any updates would only have to be applied once and it would allow a central interface for management.

The one hurdle that I'm running into is how to make it more unique for each group. I'd like vB to be integrated into each PUG's web site and not give any indication that there are other groups other than the one they joined. It's a long story to explain my reasons, but I hope you get the idea.


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Groups & Styles
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Thanks to the feedback from my original post on vBulletin.com [link], it seems that I could create groups for each PUG (Miami, Nashville, Boston, etc.) and then use different styles so that their forum looks like their web site.


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Registeration Glitch
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The only hurdle left that I can see is how to create a unique register page for each group? Ideally, the register page would place the user in the correct group, based on the forum that they were browing.

For example, let's say I live in Kansas City and I do a search on Google and find that there is a pug in my area. I browse to http://www.kcpug.interpug.com and after looking around, I decide that I want to join the group. I click on the register button in the kcpug forum, fill out the form and complete the registeration process. What variable can be set so that when I join, my group is already set.

Without this, I think I would have to moderate all new users by hand and I REALLY don't want to do that.

Thoughts, comments?

[SHalliday]

While I dod'nt have a solution yet, I have the exact same requirements and am very interested to see if there is a hack solution available or in the works.