Use new users table

[wilson18]

Hi guys,

I am in the process of trying to find the best forum software for what we need and I am just looking in to use this because I really like it and I was just wondering you guys could possibly give me some advice/information.

We run a series of different websites which operate off a shared users table. I was just wondering what would be the most efficient way of changing smf to use that users table instead of its own? Is this going to be straight forward or will it require a lot of modifications?

Any info will be much appreciated. I will point out I havent had much time to look in to everything so If I tis something obvious then I do apologise. Thanks in advance,

Chris

[Arantor]

SMF really does not play well with trying to share multiple instances with a single members table. In fact, as far as I know, none of the forum systems really do it that well because in all cases the systems were not designed with that in mind - and usually there are other pieces of information in the members table that are going to be site specific (like post count, perhaps some permissions stuff)

[wilson18]

Aye thats what I was thinking tbh. Realistically we where going to write our own forum software but we just wanted something untill then which would still allow our users to use it without having them creating new accounts etc.

Just out of curiosity, what method does it use to hash passwords and is possible to change it to another? Im just thinking about creating a script to sync users etc?

Thanks anyway.

[Arantor]

SMF uses SHA1(strtolower(username) . password)

You cannot change it to another, because it will always attempt to push it back to that.

There are integration hooks where you can defer authentication to another system based on cookies but they still require you to return the user id that you're dealing with so you still at least have to have the account present.

Seriously, there really is not a good way to do this in SMF, you just end up chasing down so many loose ends where things don't sync properly... for example avatars have records in the attachments table, plus the members table is where groups are stored (and unless the groups are exactly the same on each installation, that's going to cause all kinds of hassle for you).

The only similar thing I do know of that handles this semi-well is IPB's IP.Connect module which works in a different way to what you have in mind (it doesn't try to sync records per se, it works on a one-master-many-slave setup, and if an account doesn't exist in the slave, it contacts the master for it)

[wilson18]

Ah okay thank you for getting back to me and for providing all the information you have, I will have to have alook in to ipboard