Limiting members to an external database

[Killkenny]

Hi,

I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I did a search and came up with nothing.

I am building a site for a committee of engineers and they want a forum on the site, so I figured the natural choice would be vBulletin.

The problem comes in where they only want their members to join the forum to post etc, but they want the general public to see the threads, but not contribute.

Is there any way I could limit the registration process to only members of the committee by maybe checking a unique number(like an ID number) against their existing database which will be sitting on the same server as the copy of vBulletin.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Kenneth

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Well depending on the number of members you expect (and the time window in which they will be signing up) you could use one of the follwoing:
- Close registration, and pre-register them yourself in Admin Panel
- Allow new signups, but only with moderation by admin.

There are also some hacks around (search for them) limiting the mail addresses used to signup to 1 domain for example, or other limitations to the signup process.

[Killkenny]

Originally Posted by MarcoH64

Well depending on the number of members you expect (and the time window in which they will be signing up) you could use one of the follwoing:
- Close registration, and pre-register them yourself in Admin Panel
- Allow new signups, but only with moderation by admin.

There are also some hacks around (search for them) limiting the mail addresses used to signup to 1 domain for example, or other limitations to the signup process.

Hi there.

I'm looking at about 1200 members, and they should all be joining in the first month or two. So this is a bit of an issue.

What I have done is added a User Profile Field called ID number.

Is there any way that I could have a script in between the register page and the complete registration script, where I can check the ID field against the database of users? If there is no matching ID number in the DB, the user gets sent back to the registration page informing him of the problem.

I'm sorry I'm so dense on this subject, but I don't even know where to start. I can write the intermediate script, but have no idea how to incorporate it in the whole process. Especially the informing him of the problem part.

Thanks a lot for your help.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Well you could use a few approaches.

Consider adding a new table with the ID numbers (and maybe the matching mail address if you have them).

Now you could:
- Make a small script to pre-register them
- Or let all new registration to be admin moderated, and create a cron job that will scan all new registration once an hour, match the ID number, if ok --> registered, not OK-->delete
- Or Incorporate a test in the registration process so they can register if ID is not correct.

If you need help with this, you could PM me.