Big Dan’s Site

You have been locked out of your vBulletin administrator control panel for what ever reason weather you lost your vBulletin password, forgot your user name or email address. You cannot get into to manage your board. Is everything over with you have to start all over from scratch again right?

No. Enter a file called tools.php, this is an awesome little tool provided to you by vBulletin, whenever you download vBulletin from the members center. This file is located in the do_not_upload folder of the zip you downloaded.

In order to use tools.php you need to connect to your site via FTP and upload the file to your admincp folder, this is is normally named “admincp”, and your vBulletin customer number.

Once the file is uploaded go to your browser and enter yourforum.com/admincp/tools.php:

Enter your vBulletin customer number and press enter tools system.

Click on restore administrator access

Enter the username of who you want to restore or give admin access to. Now go back to your FTP program and delete tools.php from your admincp folder or else you will not be able to login to the ACP.

The beauty of this system is even if you forgot the password to your admin account you can register a new account and give it admin access through tools.php and then go into the ACP with the new account and reset the password for your old admin account.

Leave any questions or feedback in comments. Thank you.