I recently purchased the SMF plugin and installed it. It works as expected for new registrants, but I cannot get it to work as I expected it would for people already with a login and password on our SMF forums. These are the steps I took: 1. In SMF, created a new MemberGroup, called it aMember. I then created permissions for the aMember group by copying permissions from the SMF Regular Members group and then deleting the members permission to delete their own account. 2. In my hosting MySQL databases control panel, gave the aMember database user full permission to the SMF database. 3. On the aMember side, I installed the plugin as instructed, and under CP > Setup > SMF plugin, the database was correctly auto-detected, and all the SMF MemberGroups were displayed under the Default Level and Denied Levels, so everything was connected correctly. 4. In the SMF plugin I selected "aMember" as the Default Level which aMember subscribers will get under SMF. This setup works fine for users who do use a different name than their SMF login. After they sign-up and pay for a subscription, they are correctly signed up on the SMF side, show up in the aMember SMF Member Group, they can post messages, etc. However, for existing users, I thought they would be able to signup under aMember with the exact same name and password as for SMF and this would also add them to the aMember Member Group in SMF. I tested this for only one user (me) and it seemed to work. However, all other users have not been able to do this. Once they select the same login name under the Signup form, it says: Username xxxxxxx has been taken by another user. Please select a different log-in name If that is your account, please go to your membership page to login into your subscription. The message is doubly confusing to them as they click on the membership page to login and, of course, they can't, as they are trying to Signup for the first time! According to your documentation: "When user do sign-up in aMember, aMember will check for existing user in third-party users database. If user with the same username is exists in third-party database, it will check that user enter the same email and password. If yes, user will be allowed to go through signup in aMember. If something differs, user will be asked to choose another username, because entered is already taken." I cannot figure out what could be "differing" - username, password, and email are identical. I am trying to understand why I only got the correct behavior once and can no longer repeat it. Note that in aMember I do not convert all login letters to lower case and I do allow interior spaces in login names, just because I have current login names like that under SMF. I tested my configuration with login names without any interior spaces and all lower case and these still don't work. I need to fix this or about 40% of our members will constantly stumble unless I tell them they MUST pick a different login name than their SMF login name.
somewhat understood I discovered something accidentally. If I enter the password FIRST (both times to confirm) and THEN I enter the username, it takes it and allows the users to sign-up!!! As 6 of my beta-testers have discovered, they will never figure that out on their own. I could add instructions, but people rarely read them carefully enough. Is there a php mod that, when the integration plugin is enabled, to delay the check until after the password is entered, before the user is then instructed to select a different username? Another, somewhat klunky thing to do would be to change the order in the form, but it is very unusual to enter and confirm a password before entering the login name.
adequate fix Changing the order of password and login name in signup.html seems to be the simplest solution. That way people sign up by entering email, password (confirm), and login name. When the login name is finally entered, it then does the check on email and password to correctly decide whether it is a valid, identical user in SMF.