Sure, I’ll take requests by PM.
There’s no reason to not share. Some of the posters who helped my thought process in the other thread might like to know as well, and this info might also be useful for the Giraffe Boards or Mellophant or any other members who run vB boards.
Initially, I didn’t think any solution was workable without a hack, but with 36 Charter Members responding to the poll saying they would purchase a custom title if this feature were offered, I thought it would be worthwhile (both for them and the SDMB) to spend some more time trying to figure out a way to do this.
As you probably saw in the discussion in the other thread, it was complicated because not all Charter Members would purchase a Custom Title.
Any change to Charter Members would apply to all Charter Members, including Charter Members who did not purchase a Custom Title. And any change to Custom Title Members would apply to all Custom Title Members, including Custom Title Members who were not Charter Members.
In the first case, Charter Members who did not purchase a Custom Title would end up looking like this:
username
Charter Member
Charter Member
In the second case, Custom Title Members who were not Charter Members would end up looking like this:
username
custom title
Charter Member
Neither of these scenarios were desirable. I then tried to find some setting which would change the title or rank of Charter Members who were also Custom Title members, without changing the title or rank of Charter Members who were not Custom Title members, and Custom Title Members who were not Charter Members, and do this without moving anyone out of the Charter Member group (because of additional billing integration complications).
The solution was to create a new paid subscription and link it to the billing system (to keep track of Charter Members purchasing a Custom Title), and create an extra secondary group (to make changes to the rank of Charter Members who are also Custom Title members). So, now, when a Charter Member purchases a Custom Title, they get added to two secondary groups, one which gives them the permissions to edit custom titles, and another which gives them the rank of Charter Member in a line below their custom title. When their Custom Title subscription expires, they get removed from both secondary groups. When their Charter Member subscription expires, they get removed from the Charter Member primary group, and both secondary groups.
The two minor issues with this solution are:
- When a Charter Member first purchases a Custom Title subscription, they will show up as:
username
Charter Member
Charter Member
When they make their first custom title change (usually immediately after purchase), they will change to:
username
custom title
Charter Member
If they wish to display only Charter Member at any time, they can use Alt-255 or other escape sequences as their custom title, which will essentially make their custom title blank, and it will look like:
username
Charter Member
They can switch between the two at any time, and as often as they like.
- The second minor issue is that on subscription expiry, their title will again look like:
username
Charter Member
Charter Member
This can easily be fixed by a passing admin, or on the poster’s request. This is more an issue with updating counters rather than anything to do with the above solution, but since we don’t run a cron job to update counters for any other reason currently, this is not done automatically. If we have any PHP/SQL experts on the board, I would like to hear from them if they are interested in helping me write a script to do this.
Hope that satiates your curiosity. It’s not as straightforward as it looks to end users 
-xash
Administrator
