EUREKA!! (Dual Forum Single/shared Membership)

[irbrian]

I've really done it! Finally! I have been stressing over this for ages, and I've finally figured out how to merge the members tables for two seperate, widely used forums so that they share one set of Membership records.

It wasn't easy. Besides replacing specific instances of code in 24 PHP files, I had to modify tons of records by hand in ASCII MySQL dump files. There were literally hundreds of changes I had to make. (A word to the wise -- if you're planning to setup a DFSM, do it BEFORE you start using the forums.. it will save you many hours of work in merging your member records).

Anyway, this is less a Mod than it is a Conversion, of sorts. No offense to the creators of YaBB SE or the original, but the forum was NOT designed for this type of behavior.

If some poor unfortunate soul out there needs to do the same thing, you should email me at [email protected] and I will try to retrace my steps.

I still have one problem left to conquer -- that of cookies (and sessions). I expected that by using the same member database for both forums, and by naming the cookies the same thing on each forum, they would automatically be interchangeable, so that a member would only have to login on one forum to be logged in on the other. This is unfortunately not the case. Any advice or assistance in this matter would be VERY gratefully appreciated.

[vorapoap (vory)]

If you cookies have the same name.. it should work I think. Anyway, you should have used the mass-replace feature in text editor.. it wouldn't take more than 1 minutes.

[irbrian]

If you cookies have the same name.. it should work I think.

I thought so too. And yet, it doesn't. Which is why I mentioned that.

Anyway, you should have used the mass-replace feature in text editor.. it wouldn't take more than 1 minutes.

Yeah, of course I used that for the PHP files. That works for the $db_prefix replacements. It doesn't work for the "posts" column in the members table however, because there are some instances of "posts" that you really don't want to replace.

But I'm not talking about the PHP files, thats not what took all that time. I'm talking about the MySQL dump files. I had to manually change every numeric ID_MEMBER value in the dump files for what I call the slave or secondary forum, to that member's NEW corresponding value in the members table for the master or primary forum.

This means making the change in the messages table and the topics table, and I believe at least one other. I'd have to check again. Because these are numeric values, and they are different for EACH member of your forum, they have to be changed individually -- a mass replace would majorly scew up your dump file by changing values that should not be changed.

It could be done by a clever PHP script, I'm sure -- but I didn't want to take the time to figure that out lol -- once I knew what I had to do, I just set in doing it the way I knew for sure would work.

[Jedi~]

I'm sure that YaBBSE could easily be developed to use such a feature. Say a $db_prefix2 for the second, if it's on the same db, if it's not...... why try?

[vorapoap (vory)]

In my opinion, db_prefix2 will increase the load significantly.. and I understand now why it gave you a hardwork to do.. because you tried to integrate the table from 2 differents table (building up process).. not breaking down from the greenfield site. I would say. script can do this.. you also have to beware about the post belong to those and these members. it you changed the ID.. they have to be changed too.. I didn't hear you mention that... do u forget?? Hope not

[Jedi~]

I said easy, not fast

[Big P]

Oh irbrian, irbrian.
You'll need to come up with more than that to impress the Dev's...  

[irbrian]

lol.. i don't think I was trying to impress the Dev's, merely trying to make the information available to anyone else who might be wrestling with the sheer size of this project. If nothing else, to confirm their fears that yes, it is indeed a nasty endeavor, but it is do-able.

And yes, for those people that were enrolled on both boards and had different usernames on each, I had to choose one username and replace the other with that (as a rule I always changed it to the username they used on the 'Master' forum). But fortunately I only had 3 people with this particular situation -- the others all used the same username on each forum, or were only registered on one.