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The Group Management [message #20455] Fri, 15 October 2004 00:20 Go to next message
Abraxa is currently offline  Abraxa   Germany
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After spending hours on end on customizing and designing my FUDforums, I wanted to actually add the forums and set the user groups/permissions for them. Well... to make it short: I was majorly disappointed.

The category and forum management is wonderful and works flawlessly - but the group management unfortunately is - in my eyes - a disaster. =(
I spent more than 1.5 hours trying to figure things out but still don't know how to make the forums do what I want it to do while still being at least halfway manageable.

Okay, so we have two default groups: Global Anonymous and Global Registered. The role of those seems clear to me: anonymous and registered users are granted the permissions set for those groups, respectively, and those rules probably apply to the forums that inherit one of those default groups.
But then there is the problem of me not knowing who the settings apply to that are set for each forum listed in the group manager. The anonymous users? Or the registered users? Or both? Or even all groups?

My task that I need to achieve however is that I need to make a new group called "members" that is defined by two things:
1) can read/post in forum A
2) can read/post/make threads in forums B, C and D

So I went ahead, assigned the forums A, B, C and D to the members group and gave them read and post rights. But how do I add the permission to make new threads in forum A to that?
The only thing I could think of was to make another group members_A that controls only forum A and grants the right to make threads as well as reading and posting.

The problem I have with that is that it's far from being as intuitive as it should be, because not only would it require me to have tons of user groups giving all kinds of different combinations of permissions for one and the same group of people - it also would mean that I need to put someone belonging into the members group into 2+ groups.

What I'm wondering about is: did I misunderstand the entire concept of the group manager? I really don't see the necessity to make things that complicated when other forums (i.e. Ikonboard) make it very admin friendly while still being almost as powerful as FUDforums'.

However I do realize that it's impossible to change the current group management system and so I'd like to say that it would be very helpful to have a page in the Admin CP that shows which groups affect which forums and give which permissions.
Also, it would be awesome if it were possible to make "pseudo" groups and "link" groups. The reason for this function would be that I could have a group "members" that I assign everyone to who is a member. That group however would inherit all permissions from the pseudo groups "members_A" and "members_BCD" (pseudo groups because they can't have leaders nor members as their purpose is to give rights other groups can inherit from).
With that I could still have X different pseudo groups defining all the permissions for the different forums while having to add a person only to ONE member group instead of every single one of the groups that make up the final result.

-Soeren
Re: The Group Management [message #20456 is a reply to message #20455] Fri, 15 October 2004 01:22 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Ilia is currently offline  Ilia   Canada
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You have mis understood how some things in the group manager work, which may explain why you are unable to accomplish your goals.

1) The GLOBAL anon/registered groups DO NOT inherit permissions from anywhere normally and specify the default permissions for anon and registered users for a particular group (for registered users you can specify an alternate permission).

2) By default when you create a forum, FUDforum automatically creates a group that manages permissions for that forum. However, that does not preclude you from creating your own group that would control permissions of any number of forums.

3) The group that you create may have alternate default permissions for GLOBAL anon/registered users. Or it can be used to specify permissions just for the users who are members of that group.

4) Inheritences are something A LOT of people misunderstand, so don't feel bad about it. Inheretences are ONLY and ONLY relavent for the permissions that specify what settings can the group manager alter for a particular group.

5) Another source of confusion is the presense of 2 group managers. The user-land (as I like to call it) and and admin-land. The user-land (linked from forum's main page) allows the forum admin and group managers to change permissions of users inside groups or add additional users to those groups. The admin-lang group manager, which can be found in the admin control panel is used to create/modify/delete exiting group and assign group leaders as well as specify what permissions those group leaders may specify.


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Re: The Group Management [message #20470 is a reply to message #20456] Fri, 15 October 2004 15:08 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Abraxa is currently offline  Abraxa   Germany
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Quote:

You have mis understood how some things in the group manager work, which may explain why you are unable to accomplish your goals.

Okay, I'll try to see understand things this time then. Smile

Quote:

1) The GLOBAL anon/registered groups DO NOT inherit permissions from anywhere normally and specify the default permissions for anon and registered users for a particular group (for registered users you can specify an alternate permission).

Gotcha.

Quote:

2) By default when you create a forum, FUDforum automatically creates a group that manages permissions for that forum. However, that does not preclude you from creating your own group that would control permissions of any number of forums.

Well yes, but that was one of my original problems: "FUDforum automatically creates a group that manages permissions for that forum" - but who do these permissions apply to? Only the people that are in the group defined for that forum, I suppose?

Quote:

3) The group that you create may have alternate default permissions for GLOBAL anon/registered users. Or it can be used to specify permissions just for the users who are members of that group.

Okay.

Quote:

4) Inheritences are something A LOT of people misunderstand, so don't feel bad about it. Inheretences are ONLY and ONLY relavent for the permissions that specify what settings can the group manager alter for a particular group.

Ok.

Quote:

5) Another source of confusion is the presense of 2 group managers. The user-land (as I like to call it) and and admin-land. The user-land (linked from forum's main page) allows the forum admin and group managers to change permissions of users inside groups or add additional users to those groups. The admin-lang group manager, which can be found in the admin control panel is used to create/modify/delete exiting group and assign group leaders as well as specify what permissions those group leaders may specify.

Yeah, you are right - those two can cause a little confusion, but I understand what they're doing.

I appreciate your reply, however unfortunately you didn't address the core of my problem, though. My main problem is that apparently I need to create two groups to solve the problem mentioned in my first post:

1) members_A controlling forum A, giving read/post permissions
2) members_BCD controlling forums B/C/D, giving read/post/make thread permissions

However, as every member needs to be able to access all 4 forums A/B/C/D, I have to put every member into group members_A and members_BCD. For one group that's still manageable but I have 6+ groups, 11+ forums and all of the groups need to be members of 3 or more FUDforum groups in average so everyone gets access to all forums they need to have access to.

So all in all, I'll end up with 6*3 = 18 groups at least that all control different forums with different permissions and the current way FUDforum is set up I have no user friendly way of seeing which FUDforum group controls which resources and which permission each group sets.

With that, managing all forum groups is a lot harder since I need to go to the user-land's group manager and see which resources a particular group controls.

Also, users in the "Global Registered" FUDforum group need read/post permissions in forums A/B/E/H/K but only get thread creation permissions in forums B/E/H/K. Since there however is only one "Global Registered" group which from my understanding controls the permissions registered users get for ALL resources. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that one but it's giving me serious headaches.

Lots of questions, I know, but this is really a big problem for me.

-Soeren

[Updated on: Fri, 15 October 2004 15:10]

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Re: The Group Management [message #20472 is a reply to message #20470] Fri, 15 October 2004 15:52 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Ilia is currently offline  Ilia   Canada
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Quote:


Quote:

2) By default when you create a forum, FUDforum automatically creates a group that manages permissions for that forum. However, that does not preclude you from creating your own group that would control permissions of any number of forums.

Well yes, but that was one of my original problems: "FUDforum automatically creates a group that manages permissions for that forum" - but who do these permissions apply to? Only the people that are in the group defined for that forum, I suppose?



Automatically created groups always contain 2 users, GLOBAL anon and registered. Meaning that the permission are specified for all anonymous and all registered users. The default permissions for newly created forums are taken from the "special" Global (Anonymous | Registred) Access groups you can find in the admin group manager.

Quote:


1) members_A controlling forum A, giving read/post permissions
2) members_BCD controlling forums B/C/D, giving read/post/make thread permissions

However, as every member needs to be able to access all 4 forums A/B/C/D, I have to put every member into group members_A and members_BCD. For one group that's still manageable but I have 6+ groups, 11+ forums and all of the groups need to be members of 3 or more FUDforum groups in average so everyone gets access to all forums they need to have access to.



Default forum permissions already take care of this. All anon users have read & search permissions, all registred users have read/reply/search/etc....

Quote:


With that, managing all forum groups is a lot harder since I need to go to the user-land's group manager and see which resources a particular group controls.



If you click edit beside a group in admin control panel it'll show you which forum(s) are controlled by this group.

Quote:


Also, users in the "Global Registered" FUDforum group need read/post permissions in forums A/B/E/H/K but only get thread creation permissions in forums B/E/H/K. Since there however is only one "Global Registered" group which from my understanding controls the permissions registered users get for ALL resources.



This can be done in a number of ways, but the simplest is to simply remove the create thread permission from the global registered group (in user-land group manager) from the default group associated with forum A.


FUDforum Core Developer
Re: The Group Management [message #20480 is a reply to message #20455] Sat, 16 October 2004 15:08 Go to previous message
Abraxa is currently offline  Abraxa   Germany
Messages: 72
Registered: August 2004
Location: Germany
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Quote:

Automatically created groups always contain 2 users, GLOBAL anon and registered. Meaning that the permission are specified for all anonymous and all registered users. The default permissions for newly created forums are taken from the "special" Global (Anonymous | Registred) Access groups you can find in the admin group manager.


Thanks! =)
That was the hint that opened my eyes.

To me it seemed the Global users had the same permissions for all forums - when in fact there is a separate Global user for each forum itself.
Now I got it all set up and even though users still need to be members of 2+ groups, it's not too bad anymore.

-Soeren
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