UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Multiple Memberships

I have a few clients that I turned UBB on to. I administer their boards. Two of the clients that I deal with now want to have the ability for members to register on one board and automatically become registered on the other. They co brand products and wish to have cooperative tech support for them.
Obviously, they wish to limit the hoops that prospective members have to hop through and allow them to just complete one across the board registration.
Both clients are using 6.6.1

I searched a few key phrases on this site but didn't come up with anything.

I was thinking of modifying the path to the members folder on one of the sites, but I really don't want to screw around with that before I know what the consequences might be.

Is this possible?
Thanks in advance

It is possible, in theory, to share a common Members directory.... however, there are many potential problems.

First, there can be no shared forum numbers between the two boards, and both boards must know the forums of the other, including security settings. This is because the list of forums a user can access is stored in his profile and in the metadata files, and it may be updated to reflect reality by each instance of the board.

User post histories would be inaccurate, as they would be combined from both boards rather than just one board. Trying to search for posts by a user could be a very troublesome process, and the control panel rebuilds would only make matters worse...

Well, I tested changing the path of the members folder on my sites and it worked.
But... obviously, the names changed because of the member number on one of the sites. This I guess is because the numbers of the members coincides up to a point.

So... question. Is there a safe way to import members from one site to another without losing the their login integrity?

If that makes any sense.

And I just saw your post Charles.
Perhaps a smarter idea would be to move forums from one site to the other and just have one site? Then have a new login for all the members that were moved?
Ideas anyone?

You COULD try using the exporter/importer in 6.7 to export member data from the old board and import it into the new... it would merge in all the new member records... but there are also problems with that plan - namely that identical login names would be condensed into the existing user's account, which might not be the same user...

In fact, you could merge both boards using that method...

Thanks, I'll have to upgrade to 6.7.
I am assuming that this exporter/importer can also export Forum Data. This would be excellent.
I'll get back on that once I've tested it.
Thanks again

Yes, it does forums, categories, topics, and members.

Run the export on one board, then move the contents of the noncgi/importexport directory to the new board.

Then grab the Classic spec from http://www.infopop.com/yaml/ and put it in the importexport directory, along with the exported data.

That will let you import the data.

You'll probably want do do that on a test board first, as the import process will need to close the main board while it's working, which can take a few hours...

So I ran a test of the import export and it ran great.
Interesting though, if you want to only export say forums and messages, you still have to export all four files and then upload the classic.yaml file. Then when you import, you select only what you want imported. If I tried to export only 1 or 2 items, it would give an error.

Soooo, went to my real server and tried it with some forums. It reposted the forum data one by one and seemed to complete properly.
But then, some of the posts and forums would come up with an error like this:
Accelerator Error:

"I can't seem to open the new PNTF file (
/home/traini2/public_html/reamere/ubb/cache-ENWCZS4T/pntf/now-accel.cgi
). Perhaps the path is incorrect?"

Luckily I didn't do this on a client's server yet.

Sooo, I rebuilt all of the metadata once again, and the errors still come up

My question, Is there anything I missed?

Thanks in advance.

So I don't know much of the inner workings of UBB.classic (or women, etc...) but I saw that it looked like there was a caching issue, most likely involved with the Accelerator.
So, I turned the Accelerator off, and the error messages went away on the board.
Next, I Updated the board and cleared cache alll over.
Then restarted the board and turned on the Accelerator. It works fine the first time you go to a page, but the second time I guess it uses the accelerator and I get the error message from above.

I would love to use the Accelerator (and the Spider thingy) but need help from the masters first.

Please reply!!

I hate that error. Make sure permissions on the NonCGI/cache-/pntf directory are 777, as well as the now-accel.cgi file, if it exists.

Well...
Checked out that directory, its 777.
Next viewed the files. I see now that the caching for the UBB Accelerator is done in this folder and that the files may change.

But, there was one file that remained, called now.cgi and chmodded to 666. (Ahhhh!)

Started to play and renamed it to now-accel.cgi and set it to 777.

The error has seemed to dissappear!

I'll keep on testing but in the meantime, should this file have been named now-accel.cgi originally or did I rename now.cgi incorrectly and perhaps there should be two files?

And if the former, how did this happen? I never received this error before.

Good votes all around Charles and thanks for your help so far!

FWIW, now and now-accel are two totally different files in two totally different formats... and while you did no damage renaming it, you should have created a blank file with the name and uploaded it there instead.

Interesting.
I realized that both files would probably be necessary so last night I had uploaded my backup of now.cgi. Then I did just that, created a blank file called now-accel.cgi.
I set now-accel.cgi to 777 but noticed that UBB automatically set now.cgi to 666 originally so I left it as such.
I noticed that they are dynamic files and change in size as per caching (I suppose)

It works temporarily but the strange thing is that after about 5-10 minutes of non-use, the now-accel.cgi file dissappears! Now.cgi remains
And then the error comes back of course.
I tried it 3 times with the same results, now.cgi remains and now-accel.cgi vanishes after 5 minutes or so, making the accelerator unusable.

Sorry to drag this out but I would like to use the advanced features of 6.7.

Any Ideas?

What you're seeing is normal.

now.cgi is a dumped Perl hash containing recent visitor data.

now-accel.cgi is a flat, character-delimited datafile, written by the Accelerator.

From time to time, based on the import interval as set in the control panel, the main code will read now-accel and import its contents into the now file, then empty now-accel by truncating it.

The file should never be deleted... I'm not sure where that would happen. Let's try creating the file expressly instead.

Try this.

ubb_lib_pntf.cgi, line 400 or so reads:

#$self->warn("File wasn't there or was blank, skipping import");

Above it, add this:

my $th = $self->{FILEHANDLE}->open("file", "writeappend", $file);
$th->print("n");
$self->{FILEHANDLE}->close($th);

I see.
And I suppose Now.cgi should be Chmodded as 666?
I will try this tonight.

Thanks Charles.

now.cgi should be 666. now-accel itself should be 777...