Importing Yahoo Group Member List

[spcover]

I've been working on a site for a friend who has a pretty successful Yahoo Group. During the past six months, we've installed vBulletin 2.8 and then the VBPortal system at phpportals.com over it. So far it is looking good.

Now we want to try to move the Yahoo Group activity over to the vBulletin-based system. There are over 1,000 members in the Group.

I can download the Yahoo Group member list and convert it to a series of INSERT statements. But I need help with constructing the INSERT statements.

For one, I don't understand the numerics on many of the fields and more importantly I certainly don't know how to encrypt a password. This is an example of a phpMyAdmin dump of an INSERT statement for my user record in our vBulletin site:

INSERT INTO user VALUES (3, 6, 'sean, '435599a6845186f3ca42dca51174e8a4', 'sean@yahoo.com', 2, '', 0, 'http://www.yahoo.com', '', '', '', 'Scarsdale Technologies, Inc.\r\nhttp://www.yahoo.com', 1, 0, 0, 'Webmaster', 1, 1033611785, 1, -1, 1046835562, 1047005472, 1042211321, 4, '-5', 1, '2', '', '', 1, 1, 1, 33, 15, '0000-00-00', -1, 1, '', 0, 1, 0, 0, '');

Now, the Yahoo Groups member download file provides very little data. Here is my data record there:

'sean,'sean@yahoo.com','','M','','','Special Notices','Normal','7/10/2001'

It is basically the Username, Email Address, Sex, and Date Joined. No password is provided.

So to convert the Yahoo list, I'd need to make up a password for each user. Let's say, for the conversion, I would make both their new VBulletin username and password equal to their Yahoo name.

Can you help me?

I need an example of the statements required to encrypt the new password (in this instance, it'd temporarily be equal to the username) and to INSERT the new record into the User table.

Thanks much.

Sean

[Logician]

I suggest:

assign a random password that is unknown to users (eg. if you assign their own username without MD5ing it as password that will be unknown to all!) then let them use password lost tool to reset the password and get a new one.

If you assign another password (like their username with MD5!), everybody can login to everybody's account.

[spcover]

Agreed, but I still need help with the code.

I understand your suggestion and it was always under consideration. If I was going to assign a random password to each user, I would prefer some system-automated way to send everyone a signup email with their login details. But yes, I agree with your concern and may actually end up doing just that.

However, I still really need some help with the INSERT statement and encrypting the password.

I guess for every user I'd need two PHP commands - an encrypt of some password combined with an INSERT.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Sean

[Logician]

Yesterday at 03:12 PM spcover said this in Post #3
However, I still really need some help with the INSERT statement and encrypting the password.

You don't need to encrypt the password. Just user their username without encryption in the insert command. Since the vb assumes the password is encrypted, your unencrypted password will be meaningless to vb, so users can't login to their account in anyway without resetting the password.

Mailing users is also easy:
1- Use a "mail" command in your script to mail the users after inserting them to db
2- After the insertion, use vb's email members feature to mail them.
3- Use your yahoo listing to mail them..

You don't need to give them their usernames or passwords just give them the password reset link of your forum and ask them to use their yahoo group emails to retrieve their usernames and passwords.

[spcover]

OK. Very good. I have successfully used an INSERT command to create a test user record. See below:

INSERT INTO user values (32, 2, 'fred2', 'f5d1278e8109edd94e1e4197e04873b9', 'fred2@scarsdalenet.com', 1, '', 0, 'http://', '', '', '', '', 1, 1, 0, 'Junior Member', 0, 1048479583, 1, -1, 1048479583, 1048479583, 0, 0, '0', 1, '', '', '', 1, 0, 0, 0, 15, '0000-00-00', -1, 1, '68.70.238.236', 0, 1, 0, 0, '');

I based it off of a real user record in the "user" table. It uploads fine.

However, I have a real problem. The user "fred2" does not show up in the Members List and this seems to be a problem. For some reason, the user record is not recognized in places like the Members List and the Set New Password screen.

When I go to the Lost Password screen and input the email address "'fred2@scarsdalenet.com", the system recognizes the record and sends an email. I receive the email and click on the activation link. The system then sends an email with the username and a temporary password.

This is where I run into the next problem. I go back to the system and type in the username "fred2" and the temporary password. It takes it, displays a "Logging you in, fred2" screen, but then instead of taking me to the screen where I can reset the password, it dumps me back at the Login screen saying "You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page."

I've tested the Lost Password process by 1) manually registering a test user, 2) logging out, 3) going through the Lost Password/Reset Password process and that worked just fine, as it is supposed to. So I don't think there is a coding error anywhere.

And since I based my INSERT statement on an INSERT statement from a myPHPAdmin dump statement and I've double-checked the uploaded record against the other regular user records, I think the "users" record data is OK.

So I'm kind of left wondering whether there is some kind of authentication process I am missing. Do I have to set a flag for the user in some other table like "userfield"? I'm beginning to think so.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Sean

[spcover]

It seems if I INSERT a blank record into the table "userfield" for each userid I INSERT into "users", it solves my problem.

But I'd feel better if I knew why!

Any comments?

Thanks much.

Sean

[Logician]

Today at 07:44 AM spcover said this in Post #6
It seems if I INSERT a blank record into the table "userfield" for each userid I INSERT into "users", it solves my problem.

But I'd feel better if I knew why!

Any comments?

Thanks much.

Sean

userfield table saves data for users too so both fields must be populated when inserting a user manually. In some parts of vb code there are join queries to userfield table and if user does not have a record there, query returns no results which means user is not displayed although he is in user database

[spcover]

Logician,

Thanks so much for your helpful answers.

Sean

[sraposa]

hi there.

just curious... were you able to download the postings, or just the member list. i'm looking into moving the data over from Yahoo Groups so it can become a searchable archive on our new vBulletin site. it's funny... i hadn't even thought about the user list.

in any case, it doesn't appear to be simple...

thanks
-scott

[spcover]

We did not attempt to move the message archives from the Yahoo group. Instead we disabled the ability to post to the Yahoo Group and left a "Message Archives" link on our new site to the Yahoo group.

We just imported the Yahoo users into the vBulletin system.

If you ever figure out how to get the Yahoo messages into vBulletin, please let me know. I'm sure that's something we'd be interested in.