Will changing member id affect anything in an empty forum?

[PMCNAM]

Hi, I am new to SMF and have to say I'm very pleased with it's functionality. Most of the code is over my head but I have successfully integrated the forum into my existing site. Here's what is set up so far:

1. Registering for the forum takes place on my main site.
2. Log In/Out is controlled by main site.

New members on my site are are also registered in the forum. Here's what I want to do:

1. Manually register existing members on my site into the forum as well.
2. Change all member id's (not group id's) to match the id's on my site. (keep in mind the forum is still empty)

Will changing these id's affect anything on the forum or in the database tables?
There are 0 posts and only 20 members so far so I'm not concerned with those kinds of conflicts.

Thanks!
SMF 2.0.2
nationalforecaster.com/nf/forums/index.php

[Hj Ahmad Rasyid Hj Ismail]

I don't really think that matter much. Since you say that there is not much members i.e. 20 only. Just arrange the number from 1-20 for both site. Then let the new registration follow from there.

[Matthew K.]

Theoretically, it could. But, realistically, probably won't hurt anything as long as there are no topics or posts from that member.

[PMCNAM]

Ok great thank you both! I cannot rearrange the numbers on my site to match the forum since it will break my site but as long as changing the forum id's does not mess up anything in the database tables I should be all set. Hopefully the member id's are only stored in the member table upon registration.

[Kindred]

well, it depends what you mean by "upon registration"

the user ID is assigned (auto-increment) and every other table refers to that User ID from then on.
So, if you do it during the registration process, it should be OK...   so long as you don't have any custom profile fields added during registration.
If you do it at any time AFTER registration, you may have issues.

[PMCNAM]

So you're saying if they have been registered for a month or two and I change their id (and they haven't posted anything) I may still encounter problems? I have about 60 members to manually register after which I will go in and change their member id's. Moving forward I would assign new registrants an id matching the one from my site automatically.

What kind of issues would I encounter?
After looking through every database table I only spotted 2 or 3 minor conflicts I might get (like who's viewed the "Welcome to SMF" topic) but I'm not concerned with those.

[Kindred]

there are all sorts of settings in the smf_themes table based on userID.

personal messages are based on UserID

messages posted and messages read are based on userID

I'm sure there are other things as well

[The Craw]

The id_member column is the primary key of that table, and thus changing it is a major no no. Although it may or may not actually effect anything, it's risky and bad practice. Also, as previously mentioned, it's used as a foreign key to other tables, which means that member's IDs are cross referenced from other tables to group data relationally. Basically all this means is that you shouldn't change the member's IDs.

[Kindred]

What you COULD do instead is to create a new table which matches your system IDs to the SMF User ID based on something else (like username?)