Both freeware Discus and Discus Professional allow a moderator to add many user accounts at once by pasting in a list of users from a spreadsheet or other delimited list. This is very useful in a number of situations, including creating user accounts for each student in a class or for all members of a mailing list. These instructions apply to both version 3.10 and 4.0+ of Discus and Discus Professional, although it should be noted that version 4.0 has more options and and better handling in general of user lists.

These instructions are geared toward server administrators who are responsible for preparing the list of users. For example, if you work for the information technology division of a university and you are developing a system for professors to download their class lists, this document is for you. (If you are simply looking to paste in an existing user list, consult the administration instructions for User Manager.)

Acceptable Delimiters

Discus is set up to recognize a tab, comma, semicolon, colon (4.0 only), and spaces (4.0 only) as a delimiter. In general, tab is useful for pasting data from an Excel spreadsheet, but for preparing a web display, semicolon is generally best. Version 3.10 guesses which delimiter you used, whereas version 4.0 also guesses (more accurately) but also allows the moderator to select which delimiter was actually used.

Discus 4.0 also allows you to place entire fields within quotes, inspired by the text to columns process of many spreadsheet programs. Thus the line:

"Lastname, Firstname","username"

... would in version 4.0 be recognized as two fields. This would produce incorrect results in version 3.10 and below.

Defining Columns

Both Discus 3.10 and 4.0 do a generally good job of guessing which columns represent an e-mail address, full name, username, and password. However, it is easy to use a header row to make this process foolproof. The header row is the first row of the data being pasted in and the fields are delimited with the same delimiter as the rest of the list. A header row that defines the columns for the username, password, e-mail address, and full name with a semicolon delimiter is as follows:

*USERNAME*;*PASSWORD*;*EMAIL*;*FULLNAME*

Putting It All Together

Your user list generator should produce the appropriate header row, and then, one on each line, the data for the accounts. Keep in mind that copying and pasting tabs from a web browser does not work well with certain browsers, so a semicolon is the best delimiter to use. While it may be tempting to put this data in a <textarea...> box, these are limited in some browsers to a certain number of characters, so depending on the size of the user list, this may be cut off.