Dynamic signatures

Hi, my forum brits.forumotion.co.uk is for a group of players that play an iOS/Android game. Every month this game hosts a team event and after the event the team is ranked.

I create a medal for each event and hand out ribbons for people reaching certain targets. After each event I manually change everyone's signature and distribute the medals/ribbons. This thread demonstrates the signatures http://brits.forumotion.co.uk/t897-stopping-by-to-say-hi


The problem I have is 1) its take a long time to do for 50 plus members and the membership is increasing 2) I'm reaching the character limit.


My thought was to create an external website that could create HTML code to display the ribbons and medals for a given user.
For example calling http://www.mysamplesigsite.com/?username=simpleman


This site would be based on a database which held all the relevant information: username, ribbons, medals.

So how would one go about integrating that into forumotion and replace the current signatures?
I was thinking could I use an iframe and the URL for that would be as described above? How would I pass the username of each post in the thread etc. ?

Any alternative solutions would be most welcome.

Thank you.

So the same image is added for all the users in the signature??

Sadly not.  We've had 9 events to date and we have members who joined at various stages so they would not have as many medals.  Then you have some people who perform better than others so they would get ribbons that the others don't get.

Each medal is it's own image and each ribbon is its own image.  I've been making multiple combinations to avoid a lot of urls and also using tinyurl to reduce them further.  Making it into one image would make it a nightmare to manage.

This is an example of my signature and there are others with more.

Code:

[table border="0"][tr][td colspan="12"][size=10][b]BAF Service Medals[/b][/size][/td]
[/tr]
[tr][td][img]http://i72.servimg.com/u/f72/18/07/14/00/motto11.png[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://i72.servimg.com/u/f72/18/07/14/00/250kan10.png[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://i72.servimg.com/u/f72/18/07/14/00/origin11.png[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/ngyr88t[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/qba726z[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/moo8nn4[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/k5amwu9[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/pneby9d[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/q2ana6j[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/mzmwbda[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/nn9qy8m[/img][/td]
[td][img]http://tinyurl.com/ldkvblr[/img][/td]
[/tr]
[tr][td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][center][img]http://i72.servimg.com/u/f72/18/07/14/00/most_l10.png[/img][/center]
[/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[td][center][img]http://tinyurl.com/pe6k9bb[/img][/center]
[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

 Which looks like this:

BAF Service Medals

 I could write something to generate the html code for the signatures as above by calling another website to create it on the fly but I'd need to know the username for each post and how to then get it to appear in place of the signature.

There is no way to integrate outside data into forumotions data base.

Best thing would be to create groups for the ranks/levels, then have a forums with permissions set only for that group/rank/leval.
then you can add the appropriate updated metals/ribbons to them forums for your members to add in to their signature their self.

Either that or assign more admins to help out adding them all.

Or you can have them in groups and send out mass pm with the new metal/ribbons to the group with the new code and they can once again add it to their sig their-self

I already use groups for permissions and ranks.  Unfortunately the members are not savvy enough in HTML to manage the images and because of the 1000 character limit the signatures are no longer big enough to store the information.

The mass PM wouldn't work either as not everyone's signature would be the same, in fact few are.

I wasn't thinking of using a forumotion database.

I was thinking that if I created my own website which had my own database that I used to assign ribbons and medals to users then I could get forumotion to call a url on my website that would generate the HTML code to display as per my example.

If I was to do that though I'd need to know the user name for each post in a thread and would need to be able to use that generated HTML at the bottom of each post.

You wont be able to do anything like that because forumotion dose not allow access to forumotions data base,Forumotion is free forum hosting and do not offer to transfer data or upload anything to it's data base.

Now if you had a regular phpbb,V-bulletin, or other forums/social network software with your own server you may be able to ingrate something like this. But anything that would require uploading or accessing forumotions data base are not available.

May be you can get a few admins to run the different ranks or levels to help out with adding them?.

I don't need access to forumotions database or to transfer data.

You can have an iframe that points to a completely different site.  The url to that could be www.mytestserver.com/?username=simpleman.  The iframe would load the results of that url.  That example url would be on a completely different site using a completely separate database.

With all the variables that are exposed is one of them the username of a post within a thread?

Is it possible to add an iframe to the displayed posts within a thread?

Is it then possible to use a forumotion variable for each of the posts within the thread that can be used to create the url for the iframe.  So using the above example the iframe url would be www.mytestserver.com/?username={ USERNAME of poster }
With { USERNAME of poster } being the variable from forumotion.

Sorry but I'm not really familiar with php or forumotion hence my dragged out responses.

Where are the iframes going to be posted? if in post then the url will be what the post is.
if the iframe of a post is posted elsewhere then the url for that will be whatever site you have the iframe posted on.

But where and how do you plan on adding the forumotion variables. i cant see the variable working on a non forumotion page. and exactly where do you intent to adjust and add the variable to any foprumotion post. i mean if you can get it to work on forumotion fist then yeah technically you should be able to iframe it and place on another site.

I don't completely understand either.
then you will need the variable for each user name and post. well that sounds like more work setting up then just setting the sigs yourself or have more admins to help you do it.

But like i said i am not completely understanding either. Lets see what other staff or members have, i mean if you was to set up some sort of example then point out the parts you need. it may be a better way of understanding it then. I know you mean. i am just unsure how and where variables would be added,let alone what the correct ones would be if it would even work. I also do not understand why it would have to be on another site. if all had to be set up on forumotion in order to work. then you can just add whatever to html pages you have. but yeah i may be getting more out there then what you mean. lol

In the pic above the red box is the post as created by forumotion.  The yellow is the iframe below each post.  Or an alternative that could create the same effect.

For that to work I'd need to know how to get an iframe to belong to each post and how get the username or a userId variable for each of those posts to pass to the iframe.

So I'm guess the code would look something like this:

Code:

<forumotion post code>
<iframe src="http://www.mytestserver.com/?username=" + { forumotion variable USERNAME of poster } + """>

I hope that helps

I may have a solution but require guidance.

I can turn html on for posts and the iframe will work within a post.

Now if I can turn html on for a signature then I can put an iframe in that and hard code the username.  That will five me exactly what I need.

So all I need to know is how can you turn html on for a signature?

[edit:]
I have worked out how to turn html on the site and on the signatures.  THat means I can put an iframe in each signature and hardcode the username.  This solves my problem.

Thank you for you ideas and suggestions.  This subject can now be closed, unless you'd like a more detailed answer.

Thanks for posting the solution.

Topic Solved & Locked