vB feature

[hobbes]

A non-profit with various levels of membership would like to have a member's membership level displayed in their vBulletin forums. A good place for this would be under "Registered User" (below where the username appears in posts), or beneath the # of Posts.

Does vBulletin provide a way of having these type of additional arbitrary fields? The field could be updated automatically in the database via an external script.

As the membership levels may change over time, I prefer to steer away from changing "Registered User" to the individual member levels. In other words, avoiding what FQ has done with "Site Owner".

[Bob]

I am NOT a VB guru but it appears that in your Admin section under "Usergroups" is "Promotions" which appears to allow various automatic levels.

-Bob

[johnfl68]

How many Membership Levels do they have?

I did something similar for one of my vB forums, with a couple different membership categories. The Membership shows up under the name, and is tied to the Usergroups. You set a User Title for the usergroup, and then for that member in the Admin panel, they stay a registered member, you just tic the usergroup that they also belong to. The downside is, after saving, you have to go back to the profile, and then set Display Usergroup (this wont show up until after you set that the belong to a different usergroup).

This seemed to be the best way to handle this at the time that I found.

There is also the User Rank option, but that places a image below the member name.

John

[hobbes]

There are currently 8 membership levels.

I'm trying to avoid mucking with usergroups to implement this feature, especially as this would be an externally updated status not directly related to reputation, # days, or post count.

...

I've actually just managed to accomplish this by creating a new user table column "memberlevel", and editing the postbit template to add the display of $post[memberlevel]. The member level is then magically displayed. Hopefully future vB updates won't clobber the db field, and the template change is pretty simple to carry forward.

I'll setup a nightly cron script to retrieve the member fields from an external CRM, and update the forum memberlevel field.

Thanks for the replies!

[johnfl68]

Hopefully future vB updates won't clobber the db field, and the template change is pretty simple to carry forward.

Hahaha - with vB 4 right around the corner, it sounds like major changes are on the way.

I had to add hidden forums for certain membership levels, etc., so usergroups worked best for what I was doing.

Hope it works out for you!

John