I have run into an interesting situation that I think is a bug in DNN 5.1.1 and am looking for guidance.

I have a system with multiple portals.

If I create a user with the same user name and password in two different portals, DNN allows this.  If I try to create the users with different passwords, the system rejects the user creation because 'userid is in use'.  This seems incorrect to me.  The userid is unique for the portal.  Is there a configuratin (or somethign else) that I need to look at / change to allow portals to have their own 'space' for user names?

 Update:  I found this thread thread and it seems that this issue was raised about a year ago.   http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/89/threadid/205850/scope/posts/threadpage/1/Default.aspx

However, I'm not sure I'm understanding what is the correct behavior should be.  It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for 2 portals to have overlapping user names. 

for example, a host has intranet portals for acme.com and homedepot.com, the user name  corporate standard for each company is first letter of first name + last name.  It is not unreasonable to expect each of the companies to have a tjones.  the admin for acme.com to creates tjones, the admin for homedepot cannot...  is this right?  Imagine that support call....  

Caller: hi I just tried to create my first user and it tells me the login name is in use....  
Helpdesk: this is becuase someone else from another company / portal already created a user with that name

Note, in my web.config file requiresUniqueEmail=false as there are test / demo portals and users have multiple user ids for working with different roles, but they all have the same email address so that they can see the emails generated.

Any insight / suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

At least on my system, each user/portal registration (including the duplicate ones) results in separate rows in both the users  and the userportals table.  So it seems that the accounts aren't really shared.  the only thing that is causing sharing is the odd login behavior of picking 'wrong entry' from the users table.  This seems to be a bug to me.

If there was only one row in the users table with multiple rows in userportals table, then I would buy your argument.

It also seems that with the data model as it stands, either behavior could be supported.

• Login needs to be fixed to respect the portal id.  Then if there is only one row in the users table you get the shared account behavior, if there are 2 rows, the accounts are separate.
• A configuration parameter should be added. if set, duplicate accounts are treated as independent, portal specific accounts, if not set, then they're shared.
• account creation would need to be updated to respect the configuration parameter
• If account sharing is enabled, then all items in the account need to be identical, if not, then it really doesn't matter.
• Login should ignore the parameter, it only drives off what it finds in the tables

I would agree that this needs to be site wide behavior (perhaps overridable by a super user).

I'm not sure that creating a DNN instance for each customer is a workable solution.  The administrative overhead of setup and ongoing maintenance would be prohibitive.  In addition, each instance consumes additional server resources, requiring additional servers and leading to excessive operating overhead.