I'm working for a client who decided that only members of their organisation should be able to register and use the boards. So they introduced a new field where anyone registering must enter their membership number, which could then be checked by admins in a registration queue.

But they decided that to impose this, they would first delete all members and then ask them to re-register, this forcing everyone to enter their membership number. Because the old member profiles have been hidden and not removed (so that previous posts can be maintained), no one can now re-register their old account ... if they could then anyone could register with someone else's account etc etc.

How do I restore all the removed members? All the data files seem to be there in the members folder still, but I can't figure out what's 'hiding' them from the system. They're not mentioned in 'used_name_list.cgi' .. I thought I'd struck gold when I saw that filename!

If anyone could help with this I'd be very grateful.

Matt

What, exactly, was done to "hide" the existing profiles?

Did they by chance just change the path of the members folder? That's what I'd have done in this case, as a temporary basis that is, to not remove anything i'd want to take back later...

As far as I know they went to the full member listing in the control panel, ticked all the delete boxes and then 'update member information'.

I checked the path to the members folder and it's still the same (ie. /cgi-bin/members). That's where all the old member cgi files are. I've looked through them and I can't work out how they are deleted .. why they aren't listed any more. But it makes sense to me that they're still there, because old posts on the board refer to these members, even if they have been removed. I take it I'm right in thinking this?

Just need to know how to restore them all..

Humm, it should have removed the files from the server if they did that...

See, the login name is saved within every post, so the member file doens't need to be there; it'll show them as "unregistered" for their posts however...

What does your memberslist.cgi file look like? is it full, empty, etc?

Are your memberfiles in tact? Do they have 43 lines? (i think it's 43, too early)...

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Thanks for that, Gizmo. I was looking at what must be member files from a previous version of the bulletin board! They're all in the format username.cgi and have only one line.

I found the memberslist.cgi file which lists only the six remaining members, and the cgi files for those members (with long numbers for file names).

So does this mean that I can't restore the old member profiles?

I've been told by the client that they can't re-register the accounts. For example, if one of the removed accounts had the username "bob ellis", then that member could not re-register his account in that name .. the bulletin board says that the name is already in use.

I need to test this to make sure they haven't made a mistake. I think I'll do that now. But if that's the case, how can the members re-register with their old username?

Thanks again for the help so far! =)

Matt

Unfortunately, once the files are gone, they're just plain gone. You could probably restore the entire Members directory from backup, though.

The names of deleted profiles are preserved to prevent username sniping. You can rebuild member metadata to clear that reserved list.

Thanks Charles. I just found this by registering, deleting myself and trying to re-register.

Could you tell me where the names are held? I thought they would be in used_name_list.cgi but they're not. How do I clear this list so that the members can re-register?

Hope that's not a stupid question. It's been a while since worked on these boards. Is it one of the options in the Maintenance dropdown?

Matt

pdnlist.cgi has pdn's, so look there...

For some reason i have public_edit_profile.pl in my member directory lol... I think that may be why a mod to my board didn't work lol...

Don't manually alter the metadata files, please. Use the member rebuild tool under Maintenance.