Howdy All,

I've got a new plugin up and running on my site, but wanted to run it by folks using GForum to see if anyone would like to see additional features before making it available.

Check out this thread for some background:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/...forum_view_collapsed

Basically I have a user registration system in place which gives cookies when my users sign in. I needed a way for my users to be able to seamlessly move into GForum without having to register all over again. In addition I have several mail lists that I have been archiving to GForum for some time, so many of my users already have their e-mail addresses registered in GForum via the MailArc plugin.

So what the plugin does is this... when a user visits it checks for a cookie called "email". If they don't have a cookie then they are logged in as guest. If the cookie is set it checks for a matching enabled GForum user and simply logs them in. If the user exists but is not enabled (ie was added via MailArc) it enables them and sets their password to some generic value. If the user does not exist it creates a new user using their email cookie value as the username. So essentially all of my users that use the forums will end up with their email address as a username. It does all of this through the authenticate hook. The plugin allows you to specify the value of the cookie name to use a the GForum username.

In general, I'm looking for any comments or suggestions on improving this set-up. Or any features that people would like to see to make this plugin generally more useful.
Michael Coyne
seaturtle.org