[TriLUG] [OT] adding users to a phpBB system

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Andrew Perrin wrote:

>If anyone out there has experience running a phpBB discussion board
>system, I could use some help. Specifically, I have a file containing a
>list of people I'd like to add as users to our system. Any idea how to do
>this "en masse"? I assume it involves adding records to one or more of the
>underlying MySQL tables, but haven't found out which ones.
>
>Thanks.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
>Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
>clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
>
>  
>
Disclaimer: I have not done this manually myself.  I have some 
experience with creating custom plugins that tinker with the database, 
and with modifying the underlying DB, but not specifically with adding 
users in this way.

 From a cursory memory-refreshing glance over the tables, I would hazard 
a guess that you should be able to read them into the phpBB_users table 
(name may vary depending on what prefix you chose) with a little bit of 
care.  You'll of course need to keep user_id unique, and you will have 
to either crypt the passwords before you add them, after you add them, 
or change them one-by-one in the web interface.  You can of course set 
global preferences this way as well, as most every user-specific setting 
is contained there.

As another suggestion, it might be simpler to write a short perl script 
which would take your data and manipluate the web front end to do the 
inserting.  It's also not beyond the realm of possibility to use the php 
functions and create a short page to do bulk adds in the way you 
describe.  If I remember correctly the underlying code is pretty 
modular, so it might not be too hard to hack that together.  You could 
of course use the existing user adding page as a template.  I looked 
over the mods section on phpbb.com but didn't find anything like this 
unfortunately.

If you have more specific questions, feel free to post them and I'll try 
to answer.

Aaron S. Joyner