Restricting Forum Membership to Members of my Organization

[MrPresto]

I manage a web site for an organization.  I want to implement a bulletin board forum on our site that is restricted only to our organization's current members.  I also want our bulletin board users to know the actual identity of people who post on the forum - we do not want our forum members to hide behind anonymous user names.

When a member first joins our organization, or when they renew their membership, we provide them with a LOGIN ID which is required to log into our organization's web site as a member.  Each user has their own LOGIN ID which remains valid until their current membership in our organization expires.

Logging in with their LOGIN ID creates a several cookies on the member's computer which remain there as long as they remain logged in, or until their membership in our organization expires.

One of the cookies is a flag to indicate that they are logged in as a current member of our organization. 
The presence of this cookie would verify that the user is a current member of our organization and authorized to access the bulletin board forum.

A second cookie contains the member's actual name.  A third cookie contains the name of the local chapter group they belong to within our organization.

I have 3 questions:

1.  Is there a way to configure Simple Machines to look for the presence of the first cookie before allowing users to register as forum members?

2.  Once registered as forum members, can Simple Machines require the presence of this cookie to allow them to continue accessing the forum?

3.  When members register for the forum, can their actual names and the names of their local groups be extracted from the cookies mentioned above to create "signatures" which will be printed at the end of each forum post to identify the source?  If so, can the members be prevented from altering their own "signature" without administrator assistance?

[margarett]

Welcome to SMF

That's not really how it works and it would require an overhaul of the code.

You can easily do a similar approach with an invite system, that exists as a MOD and you, as administrator, can manage those.

The registration procedure would then be normal. I think there is also a mod to require the real name at login.

[MrPresto]

margarett, thanks for the reply.

What is an "invite system?"  How does that work?

Sorry, I'm a newbie - just trying to figure out if Simple Machines is the answer to our web site need.

[margarett]

You can look at the description of those 2 MODs:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3080
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2567

An invitation system is an... invitation system that hooks to SMF's standard registration system. With such MOD installed, you can invite members to join your forum, while (optionally) you disable the "free registration" method usually employed.

This means that you can create invites for your organization's members, they join and you can manage them after registration.
It's not *exactly* what you wish but it can be an alternative.

Or... Maybe a different approach that requires some custom coding as I *think* this doesn't exist by default...

Logging in with their LOGIN ID creates a several cookies on the member's computer...
One of the cookies is a flag to indicate that they are logged in as a current member of our organization.
A second cookie contains the member's actual name.  A third cookie contains the name of the local chapter group they belong to within our organization.

I (me, myself ) have no idea on how to work with cookies. Someone might be able to develop this on a custom base.
But, if you can update a table in SMF's MySQL database, it would be doable to ask for a certain ID (that would be matched to a pre-filled table). Another field would be automatically updated with the user real name. And yet another field would pre-fill the membergroup. Of course, you'd need a way to manage that table with such informations.

Ideas, ideas
Anyway, there is nothing that automatically matches your request. I believe it might be accomplished but how, it depends...

I'm moving your topic to a more adequate board

[Kindred]

You could also read the wiki articles on integrating smf with an external system.
Using one of the three methods, it should be possible to turn off smf registration and only allow users from your main system, automatically creating them when they have a valid username.