Creating accounts in other dev forums

Strangely enough, a few of us were thinking: It would be cool to have some way to transfer accounts and profiles from one dev forum to another. Possibly checkboxes when you sign up giving you the option to also register in other forums, and/or an option in the User CP to copy your account to any or all of the other dev forums. It would create the account and also copy preferences and such. Reputation should probably be left behind, but that's probably a whole new debate. Post counts would also be left behind of course, unless something like "Dev-wide post count" was kept track of.

From a business point of view, it would make new users aware of the entire dev network and possibly increase membership in the lesser known dev forums. This way, each of the forums can piggyback off the success of the others.

I realize that the current registration process is very easy and quick, so the difficulty in making such a hack might not be totally worth it, but as noted it would at least raise awareness of the other forums, and make things easy for everyone to join the other forums.

To users: Is this something you would use?

To the admins: Is this idea plausible in your eyes?

An additional thought, should this be implemented: When banning users, it also might be a good idea to give mods the option of applying the same ban dev-wide, if the same account exists on other dev forums. Otherwise it would make things too easy for spammers to spam dev-wide.

The thread where the idea was born

this was discussed quite a while ago, not sure if it was in public or private but I know it was talked about, and I believe in the end it was that not enough users would use it to make it worthwhile. one idea though was to combine all the sites forums to one so they all run from the same db etc... but of course that had it's drawbacks, anyways guess we'll see what they say

In vBulletin it is possible to select a seperate users database from the main database. If they did this for all dev sites it would be possible for all the sites to keep the forums completely seperate, apart from the user accounts which would be 'dev wide'. Rep and post counts would be the same on every forum though I imagine. Also forum permissions would be tricky because a mod would have mod rights in every forum, for example.

This is something that could be easily implemented, however there is the small setback of merging all the user tables of which many contain users of the same name However we also can't guarantee xyz at Devshed is the same as xyz at Devhardware.... Thus causing more problems.

So overall, it would be a nice feature, but would take a hell of a lot of work!

I think what people are hinting at is a shared pub/lounge, but I could be wrong, it's happened before

Actually, we were talking about other common threads/forums around the domain... DevShed has a little hardware section, DevHardware a software forum, ASPFree has an OS forum... it's understandable that a regular Shedder would use the local resource to find an answer to their hardware problem, not realizing that right next door is a Hardware board (actually two, counting DevArchives) with the answers already found.

We were just looking for pain-free ways to encourage users to cross between the forums a little easier, or to at least increase awareness of the other Dev forums.

You know, I've been in DevH for more than a year and it wasn't until yesterday that I found out that there were links to all six forums at the very bottom of the page... If I knew about DevShed that long ago, I would have been over here asking my complicated VBA, Excel and Access questions and actually getting answers instead of listening to virtual crickets over there.

I'm still trying to work out an idea for increasing awareness of the other forums, like links in sections or forums that have counterparts in the other boards or soething.

They're at the very top too. Well, not the actual forums, but the main sites of the whole dev network.

Yeah, knew about those... Didn't know Dev Archives was an actual forum 'til someone told me.

The post leader there has 7 post. Trolls away!

I'm working on it... with actual content, too

A common Sig perchance?

What is DevArchives about anyway?