This is quite a bit of work, and it is more than a "work around." I had previously written a work-around which was adopted by most and even by the developers. I found some snipets of my code in the latest 1.7.2 update.php code.
I want to simplify my website for our users so I originally wrote it so that users would not have to use multiple usernames and passwords to do thing on our site. And I wanted to make it easy for our users to upload their data (otherwise they might not update at all).
So- when Roster 1.7.2 was released, they re-did a lot of the code including adding a RosterLogin class. However, as I was reading through the code I saw that it wasn't uniformly adopted into the functionality of the different pages.
I've re-written my previous code and made it in the form of the RosterLogin class. I also had to make some tweaks to other files as I went along, to further add the options that I wanted.
Specifically- I modified the way that authentication works. I added an option to require username/password for character updates as well as for guild updates. That required changing the RosterLogin class itself so that instead of getAuthorized() there is now getAuthorizedUser() and getAuthorizedAdmin(). And the changes to the pages that use this was quick and easy.
The other things I did was modify the settings in the config table of the database to better specify what the variables we are using do. I changed the meaning of "authenticated_user" to be on/off whether you want to require a login for character updating. I added a setting of "update_enabled" to turn on/off all updating. (and made the necessary code changes in update.php) I also added a setting of what login script to use.
Then I modified settings.php to follow those settings we just created.
I also modified the login.php file to better use the getLoginForm function.
I added some lines to the language file, but only the english texts because I don't know any other languages well enough to make those translations.
Then finally I ported my old code into the new RosterLogin library format to make it compatiable.
<whew>
Alright, so I have included my phpBB_login.php file along with a listing of all the file changes I had to make to make this work. I hope that you find it usefull and I hope that the devs integrate this into their next version.