Bridging logins for multiple Vbulletin forums??

chrism2007

if im not mistaken adverts.ie and boards.ie are bridged

when registering for boards it also registers for adverts.

doe anyone know how this is done?

AlmightyCushion

I assume they just share the same database or user table. So if you sign up to boards it writes to the user_table whereas if someone else was to sign up to adverts it would write to the exact same user_table. I could be wrong though.

CuLT

Adverts.ie actually runs on Photopost Classifieds, not vBulletin; it just pulls in user data (and some styling) from Boards.ie's vBulletin install. The ability to integrate with vBulletin (and other forums) is actually a marketed feature of the software.

There is no technical difference between signing up for Boards.ie and signing up for Adverts.ie, it's all just Boards.ie's vBulletin registration system.

The "magic" occurs when you log in to Adverts.ie, where it connects to the Boards.ie session system and uses those details to populate posts and comments instead of it's own user table.

It's a pretty horrible system all told; we're planning on decoupling them in the future.

chrism2007

do you think its possible to bridge multiple vBulletin forums?

if they were on multile domains?

ive never seen it done before thats why i was interested in the adverts.ie system

CuLT

Multiple domains isn't that much of an issue in itself; vBulletin specifically allows for cookies to work cross domain (when explicitly specified).

I don't think what you want to do is particularly difficult, will probably just be tedious. I imagine (and bearing in mind I've never actually done this) you'd want to pick one install as the "master" install (ie, the one where all the user information will be written to and read from).

You'd have both installations on the one DB (just to reduce complexities) with different table prefixes to distinguish between them.

After that, you'll need to go through the code of the "slave" installation and look for references to the user table, changing them to refer to the master's user table.

After that there's probably some sort of fiddling to be done with logins and session management to make sure it's consistent.

It looks like someone tried to do this for vBulletin 3.5.x here, might be worth investigating what they did to achieve their goal, and if several years on they are confident they made the correct decision.

aidan_walsh

I cannot recall, is this much the same system that was used when setting up boards.tv and the other "sister sites" or were they just DB dumps?

CuLT

They were just one off dumps.