Hello from Belfast :)

In DotNetNuke users and portals (and roles) are partioned for security reasons so a user in one portal is not normally a user in another. However we do support 1 use case for cross-portal membership - typically when a new user is added on a portal both a user and a userportals record are created. However, if a user has the same username/password combination then we only create the userportal record i.e. there is 1 user record but many userportal records. This means that the user can log into one portal but access all of them. However roles are still portal specific, which makes sense e.g. a user who is an admin on one portal should not automatically be an admin on another portal.

There are a few solutions out there which handle this scenario such as http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcovere...  though others have handled the situation similar to yourself. The danger though is that in making direct database updates you can cause impossible/wrong data to be written or that scripts that work in one dotnetnuke version don't work in another. Another option that some people choose is to implement a single sign on system but this only solves user authentication across multiple portals (the active directory provider is an exception to this as it also syncronises user roles). Another option is to code up a role provider and authentication provider to do this - in this way you can make the API call's and avoid potential breaking compatibility.

Finally, we have an enhancement known as "portal roles" on our roadmap that would allow for sharing users and roles across portals - at present I believe this is being considered for the Q4 release (though that's up to the business team to make the call)

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