Multiple forums share users

[Kirsty2]

I have found this http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/share-m ... bb-boards/ for 2.x but does it work for 3.x?

[Paul]

No, that will not work correctly for 3.x. 2.x and 3.x are complete different products.

[Kirsty2]

I appear to have been successful by pointing all forums to these joint tables

banlist
disallow
groups
privmsgs
privmsgs_folder
privmsgs_rules
privmsgs_to
ranks
sessions
sessions_keys
user_group
users

Is there anything else that i've missed that i should have joint?

[Brf]

It will not work.
Your permissions will be messed up, unless you have have a separate user_permissions field for each board.

[Kirsty2]

Only the tables i've listed above i have shared, so there are still separate tables of that nature. Anything else i should share?

[Paul]

As brf said, you will need to unshare several fieldsin the users table, at least. Modifying these will also means several code changes.

[Kirsty2]

Can you give me an example where it won't work? I have done testing and all appears to be ok. So i need to see where/how this won't work - if it's possible. Thanks!

[Paul]

Everywhere . It will cause major problems with permissions on both forums.

[sandman229]

I have created multible forums and they shared users. The only problem was if you let users upload there own avatars, each forums won't find the Avatar except for the one where it was uploaded.
We had discussed this before sometime ago.

Here is a link:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1420105

It does work. It can be done....

[Paul]

I never said it cant be done . I only said it cant be done with just changing the some table names. There need to be changed a lot more things.

[sandman229]

I never said it cant be done . I only said it cant be done with just changing the some table names. There need to be changed a lot more things.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that you said it can't be done, I did test it with multible forums (3) on my local computer. Only sharing users database. I see some problems with the Avatars, However, I didn't set it up on a full production web site. There might be some other problems I didn't see.

I remember that discussion (the above link). I thought it was longer than it showed. oh well.

Hmmm now you have me curious. I might set up one to see how it goes and what problems that might be encountered. I know this question has come up before..

http://www.kittykorp.com

[Paul]

I currently dont have the time to explain it very expanded, but its basicly this:
you have 2 forums, combined users table, not combined permission table.
In phpbb_users there is a field called user_permissions, what is a cached result of the permission table. This is updated once you somewhere you your permissions.

Now lets say, we have at board a 3 forums, what are all public readable. We have at board b 3 forums, what are only readable for admins. We change at board a the permissions, so all users can read it. At board b, the permissions are read. Hey, the cached version (What is from board a), says the user has all read per,missions, lets display it!

You understand now what I mean? There is a permissions conflict between the 2 boards. The fix for this is to rename the field, and modify all files to use the renamed field.
This issue might be for more fields, I havent tried it yet.

[Brf]

I have seen other users claim success once they created multiple user_permissions fields in their users table and had each board access only its own.

[Son of a Beach]

It would be great to see this functionality (ie, multiple boards sharing same users) built into a future version of phpBB. Is this ever likely to happen?

I know that such a feature would not be used by all phpBB boards, but it would seem that the effort required to implement it is not huge (although far from trivial, too!), compared to the enormous benefit it would have for those who would use it.