I’ve recently had to artificially inflate the user count and online users for a vBulletin forum. Luckily, I found an excellent plugin which does just this. Not only does it increase the counts for online members and guests, but it also lists real usernames.

It is implemented by grabbing the existing member names from the database and appending them to user list at the bottom of the forum home. This plugin is very ingenius and pretty believable – good if you are starting up a new vBulletin powered forum board.

Link to download the Fake User plugin. Note that you will need a vBulletin.org account and a valid vBulletin license to download this plugin.

A useful code snippet for you here. It’s a PHP script which calls in the Dymo label printer ActiveX control, and prints out what it finds in various $_GET variables.

<?
// This will print a label via dynamo’s ActiveX controls (so must be using IE) –>
// You should pass $_GET variables to be printed: line1, line2, line3, line4, line5, line6
?>

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=VBScript>

Dim DymoAddIn, DymoLabel
Set DymoAddIn = CreateObject(“DYMO.DymoAddIn”)
Set DymoLabel = CreateObject(“DYMO.DymoLabels”)

DymoAddIn.Open “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DYMO Label\Label Files\Address (30252, 30320).LWL”

DymoLabel.SetAddress 1, “<?= $_GET['line1'] ?>” + chr(10) + “<?= $_GET['line2'] ?>” + chr(10) + “<?= $_GET['line3'] ?>” + chr(10) + “<?= $_GET['line4'] ?>” + chr(10) + “<?= $_GET['line5'] ?>” + chr(10) + “<?= $_GET['line6'] ?>”
DymoAddIn.Print 1, true

</SCRIPT>

Things of note include the path to the label. The code is written to work with Windows XP (C:\Documents and Settings\) so may need altering for Windows Vista (C:\Users\). Although Vista is supposed to be able to compensate for this kind of backwards compatability I have not been able to test this code on Vista as of yet. Also, of course, the LWL label file can be changed to any that are currently installed.

chr(10) is the how we output our new line character in VBScript. Also, as you’re probably aware as VBScript is calling in two ActiveX controls you’ll have to make sure the end-user is using Internet Explorer.

yes, boing..