Change post owner or account?

[Daisy Johnson]

I've just been forced to finally give up my old 3.8.4 and move to 5.7.2. However, I can't find anything that would help replicate functionality I had on my old board. We used to have the following two options:
1. Change post owner (click on the post and change it to whichever user account you want)
2. Quick account switch (a drop-down menu, where you could quickly switch your account to any linked account).

I can't seem to find anything replicating either of those features for vB 5. Is there anything?

Reason why we need this: it's a creative writing board and we might need to post under different user accounts 20-30 times per day, and manually logging out and logging in was so tiresome back in the 2000s that it was putting people off from participating. We saved a huge amount of time with these features.

Thanks if you can point me in the direction of anything, or if you have any ideas for an alternative. Or perhaps something where we can select a drop-down menu to display different postbit fields depending on which character we're using? Willing to adapt if there's anything at all that might save us some time!

[glennrocksvb]

These are good and very useful mods but I've never seen these in a forum.

1. Change post owner
   • Is this for Admins/Moderators only?
2. Quick account switch
   • When linking an account, does the account being linked have to grant approval for the linking? If yes, how does the process work? I assume there should also be a way to unlink an account. Do you have a link to this mod to see more details on how the whole thing works?

[Daisy Johnson]

So sorry but I don't have a link (the malfunction of my board is why I'm making this new one).
1. Yes, staff only. Regular users don't see this.
2. The accounts are linked in the admin CP and are linked/unlinked by staff.

Edited to add: I'm not fussy about finding identical mods but ideally I would like to find some way to make changing 'characters' (accounts / postbits) easier than having to manually log in and out dozens of times per day.

[glennrocksvb]

Is this similar to Gmail app functionality where you can add multiple Gmail accounts and switch to any account without logging in and out?

[Daisy Johnson]

Is this similar to Gmail app functionality where you can add multiple Gmail accounts and switch to any account without logging in and out?

Yes!

The way it worked on my old board was we had a dropdown menu for account switching, like with Gmail. The staff would set up the 'character' accounts and add the link in the admincp, and then the member could switch between their character accounts and their main account.

Then the staff additionally had the ability to change post owner by checking the box in the corner of the post and selecting it from the dropdown menu alongside the move, delete etc options.

I'm aware this probably sounds like a petty concern but a lot of account switches per day really adds up...

[glennrocksvb]

What are "character" accounts and how are they different than regular user accounts?

[Daisy Johnson]

Some context to make this make sense: It's a writing forum. A little like how in a dungeons & dragons game you'd have characters talking back and forth and alternating taking actions, we do that in a written form on the board. Our membership has been doing this since way back when vB 3 was released so we've developed an enormous array of characters.

Regarding the accounts: Character accounts are just regular member accounts but with less forum permissions, e.g. they can only post in the specific game forums and not in the general forums.

Each person has numerous characters, and the character accounts are used to display your character visually via your postbit (character image, name, age and other attributes are shown via profile fields in postbit header). I don't have a screenshot to show you from the board I'm trying to rebuild but I can show you the in-progress board I started rebuilding today. This is one character but imagine that each person might have 30 characters - I need some way for them to display which character they're writing as each time they post. [Don't judge the layout - I still need to edit some things and figure out where that green bar is coming from!]

Thank you for everything you've been posting, by the way. Your horizontal postbit was brilliantly helpful and I've got more things open in tabs.

[glennrocksvb]

Thanks for providing more details.

So each person might have 30 character accounts with 30 different email addresses? How are they able to manage these much email addresses? Or do you allow registering the same email address for multiple accounts?

[Daisy Johnson]

On the vb 3 it didn't require an email address and the linked character accounts were set up via staff in admincp. Since email addresses are required now I've adapted it to allow multiple sign ups from the same email address and will be expecting as a rule that each member will have their character accounts connected to their one email address.

I know from a security perspective that's not great but we're extremely niche and largely hidden away from the world so the likelihood of an issue is low from a situational standpoint.

[glennrocksvb]

This sounds like a custom work just for you since it is very specific to your forum.

[Daisy Johnson]

Got it, we'll make do. Thanks for the support anyway!