vbhacks.com, wondering if I could get help.

[c-pr0mpt]

Will we get sshots of the design once its complete? I'd like to check it out.

[Admin]

That's really upto Sinecure and Prolex.

But anyway, I got something important.
We of course don't want to support / help pirates.
But also, no one will enter his licence info there, and even if someone did, we have no way of verifying that.
So do you have any ideas of how we can know that this user is a paying customer of vBulletin?

Thanks for any ideas.

[JamesUS]

Well, there's no way you can validate their license info like we have here, because the site can't have access to the vB License database. You'd have to have enough moderators on the staff that could check here when it is suspicious.

I can't see any feasible way to have them enter the info at vbhacks as well.

[c-pr0mpt]

Create an area in the profile (required field) that asks for a certain word that is in the member area. This field in the profile should not be shown to anyone except Mods and Admins. And then add something that shows an icon or something in their profile so everyone else knows whether they entered it or not.

You could even make it kinda like a password during registration possibly.

or something along these lines. Can't think of nothing else.

[Admin]

That's what I thought James, maybe a mod from here could have special access to the user stuff, so he can "tick" users.
But I'm not sure you guys are alowed to publicize this info (cuss you don't allow us see it here).

[Admin]

That's probably what we're gonna do, eventually, if don't find anything better.
But of course it won't be a word (like "download" ), more like a sentence.

I dunno, this is a really tough one.

[IanMFT]

I think that first of all, you should REQUIRE a link to their homepage and maybe hack it so if they want, it will be private to everyone except mods and admins. This would probably help you out.

As for the members themselves, maybe require that you have an account on this site with their liscence info entered in....i dunno, that's quite a predicament, how does UBBDEV handle this? Maybe if you guys get sanctioned officially by jelsoft, you can have a liscence info or confirmation code field. IE: jelsoft writes a script that will generate a code for you based on your liscence info and they could have a semi private script that will decode it and check it against the user database and tell you without disclosing any info about the actual key....you could also hack it so each key entered into your forums has to be unique per user...

I dunno, just some thoughts...btw, if you guys need help with site design/matinence/moderating I am glad to help, I love vB and I'm starting to REALLY learn it.

~Ian

[Admin]

Good ideas Ian.

I added a yes/no button about the homepage, so that's also something.

[WEBDosser]

This sounds a good idea.. i allready run a small VB help and hacks forum on my site and have been looking for a way to check if a user has a valid licience. at the moment i have to email Mike with there licience number NOT there licience password number.. but this would be a lot better..

[chrispadfield]

Originally posted by FireFly
That's what I thought James, maybe a mod from here could have special access to the user stuff, so he can "tick" users.
But I'm not sure you guys are alowed to publicize this info (cuss you don't allow us see it here).

Ed/Mike was, i think, working on a way round this for vbulletin.org. I think the idea was that you typed in your username and password and then the script checked to see if that combination would have given access to the member's area. If so then it works if not it dosen't.

Whether jelsoft will be happy about you asking for member's info I don't know but it is a thought anyway.