[Forum] How to update Forum Information outside of the Admin Control Panel?

[Silviu]

Hello everyone,

Our site is deeply integrated with vBulletin and we want to offer our users the possibility of having a forum section (child forum) created automatically for them and setting them as moderators for it, like this:

Category
-- User created section #1
-- User created section #2
-- etc

Basically, the workflow is along the lines of:

User X specifies a name for the section (or child forum, if you will) -> section is created under category Y -> user X is made moderator of said forum section.

Now, since we don't want to do this manually, because we're talking about a lot of users, we've automated the process via SQL inserts in the database, but the problem is that the newly created forum section isn't shown until we manually run the Rebuild Forum Information process from the ACP in the Maintenance page. Which defeats the whole point.

So our problem right now is that the child forum is inserted into the database, but it's not actually shown on the frontend or even in the Forum Manager from the ACP. Which leads to these 2 questions:

1. What other tables are modified by vBulletin when adding a child forum, apart from forum?
2. If there's no other way around it, can the Rebuild Forum Information process be remotely triggered or run as a cron job?

As far as we can tell, the issue resides with the forumcache field in the datastore table, which we can't manually modify.

[Paul M]

Really you should use the forum datamanager to add them, not direct queiries.
...and custom code questions should be asked on vbulletin.org rather than vbulletin.com.

However .....

I assume you are doing this via php ? if so, then you should be able to rebuild everything after the inserts using this ;

require_once(DIR . '/includes/adminfunctions.php');
build_forum_permissions();