How do I View Calendar and PM for Anyone?

[MikeBergman]

I'm trying to find a way to allow anonymous (unregistered) users be able to send PM's and view the calendar all the time BUT not have access to view the forum.

The reason I want to do this is cause the site I'm building, only registered members should be allowed to view the forum but anyone should be able to view the calendar or send a pm to any member (that has pm enabled, and obviously the pm will arrive as from unknown and the person who sent it won't be able to get a reply but that's fine, I just want to be able to send messages).

I have tried enabling Private Messaging option for unregistered users but it doesn't seem to work, even when I click to message a member it still says I don't have pm-ing turned on. I checked to make sure the member was able to recieve them and they are so not sure why that doesn't work, perhaps a bug cause it's set in pemissions.

But for the Calendar issue... there doesn't seem to be a permission option at all for the calendar, it seems that it's linked to the forum, users who can view the forum can also view the calendar.

I'm pretty new to vBulletin but I have a fairly good understanding of php, just not familiar with the vBulletin system so if anyone else knows how/where/what I need to change these options, please let me know,

greatly appreciated,

- Mike Bergman

[Admin]

What you want to do is very hard and even borders impossible... since guests don't have a user ID, they are just given the temp ID of zero.

[MikeBergman]

Well, I wouldn't think it would be that difficult, couldn't a hack just be written that if a user ID == 0 then display the calendar or allow the user to send a PM. If a PM is recieved and the user ID is 0 it tells the member that it was sent from a deleted user. Well that's fine with me, I know that because I tried just loading up phpMyAdmin and entering the PM message myself and it worked fine. I know I'd be able to write a PM program completly separate from vBulletin that would just insert the PM data into the database. I just thought someone might know a much simpler way just by editing a few lines somewhere so that user ID 0 can send a message.

If I knew vBulletin better I'm sure I could figure it out, I just started useing it a few days ago and still trying to figure out how everything works.

The calendar issue is not as big of a deal to me because I can just turn on forum viewing but turn off viewing of threads started by other members and turn off posting. They would be able to see the initial page of the forum but really not be able to do anything else.

I just thought it'd take a lot less time if someone knew what lines I could edit so user ID 0 could post PM's than it would for me to write a whole script just to post PM's to the database, that's all.

So, if there's anyone else that might have any idea or even knows of any hacks that already exist that allow you to do something like this, please let me know, I've been searching this board for a couple days now, haven't been able to find anything but maybe someone has done it and I just couldn't find it.

Thanks again,

Sincerely, - Mike Bergman

[Admin]

You mean you want to allow guests to ONLY send PM's? Ahh, ok. I thought you wanted them to be able to receive and read as well. In that case it's pretty easy (see how we went from impossible to easy? )... I'm sure someone will be able to do that.
You will need to hack private.php to accept messages from $bbuserinfo['userid'] == 0, and hack it a bit more to distinct between messages from users and messages from guests.

As for the calendar: You can just enable it by editing the Unregistered usergroup's permissions.

[MikeBergman]

Yeah, only send PM's is what I want, they don't need to recieve them at all.

Just wondering if someone maybe has already written a hack for this or perhaps knows specifically what to edit, I've tried messing with the code but my changes don't seem to be working.

As for the calendar, I don't think that there is a setting specifically for the it in the permissions, there's only one for the fourm which is linked the calendar, but I suppose that's alright for now.

The PM issue is more important. I don't understand why they have an option in the unregistered permissions for using PM because it doesn't make a difference what you set it to, they still can't send them.

So. If anyone can help me or knows specifically what I need to modify, let me know :nervous:

Thanks,

- Mike Bergman