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

[Andrew Perrin]

Thanks for the responss. For the record, it appears I only have to
populate three fields in one table for it to work. The table is
phpbb_users, and the fields are user_id, username, and user_password.
user_id is a unique integer, username is obvious, and user_password is an
md5 hash of the password. This is all easily automatable using perl.

Thanks again-
Andy

----------------------------------------------------------------------
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


On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Aaron S. Joyner wrote:

> 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
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