Previous members from other site

[davidrbarrett]

I have a list of 200 members (prepaid) from a previous forum. What I want to do is have these members registered and stop any other people from registering as they have to join via cheque thru another company. Is this possible?

[Liquid-Host.net]

You could go into the admincp and add them all again. Or you could upload the user tables to the new vB... I suppose if you only want certain members you could edit the dump in a text editor before you upload it

[Wayne Luke]

David,

What previous software did you have? That will determine if we have an importer for your users and their messages.

As for your second question, you can turn off registration in vBulletin and require new users to go through your existing registration system.

[ManagerJosh]

Are you using something like ProBoards or EzBoards David?

[davidrbarrett]

i'm redesigning a company's website and the previous version had a homegrown PHP forum which had 200 members that had paid by cheque, and were given access to the forum by username & password via email.

basically i want current members having access to the forum and not allow guests to use the forum at all. any joining will do so by paying by cheque as previously done, so i don't want to use paypal etc.

can i disable the register part of the menu?

[Wayne Luke]

Yes, you can do that. With the vBulletin 3.0 product currently in beta test, you can even tie the forum into Paypal for the registration.

If you look at www.vbulletin.com/admindemo/admin, username: admin, pass:admin, you can turn registration off simply and easily by changing a switch under vBulletin Options. The system will automatically display an error message for those wanting to register, which you can change to link to the current registration service.

Furthermore, you can set the system so that guests cannot see the forum at all and are presented with a login screen under the Usergroup Permissions screen.

If your previous forums are in MySQL, you could probably write an import script for members and messages in a couple of hours using our provided scripts as an example.