Support Forum

Hey gang! Since I can't find a post about this already, I've gone ahead and posted this one.

I want to start by saying that SimplePress is doing a great job for us. It's nicely full-featured in ways you just don't find with most WP forum plugins, and that makes myself and my users really happy (we're moving a bunch of people over from phpBB).

However, given the nature of our site, I've come across a major headache I hope might be revisited in a future version(probably have to wait for 5?). Specifically, whenever there's a need to do a significant amount of forum permission changes, the current UI for doing so-- unless there's another option I can't find here or in the wiki-- makes it a time-consuming process prone to human mistakes of repetition.

The background:

We're a gaming community, and in addition to discussing games of all sorts, we host a few player organizations(guilds) in various current and upcoming titles. Specifically, we use WP3 multi-site to give them a website, and we form a new SP group in our community forums to house their own little section. To control access, naturally, we then create two user groups for each guild (one for guild members, one for guild admin), which provide appropriate access. On the whole, this works beautifully, and we're really happy with it.

The issue:

The problem is, that every once in a while, we're going to get a new guild in, and whenever we do, pre-existing forums have to have permissions added to them for the new user groups. The fastest way I can find currently to do this is by going into the Forum admin, and using the forum list to Add Group Permissions for the new user groups. This process currently involves clicking the add permissions button on a group, waiting a bit, picking the user group, picking the access level, clicking update, waiting a bit, and then getting tossed up to the top of the page when it reloads. Currently, we have four guilds in the community, so the next time we add one, we're going to have to repeat the process eight times, provided we don't lose our place.

Obviously, the potential for this to snowball rapidly is there, and if for some reason we have to make a more extensive change to group/forum permissions (and we've already made a coupleof mistakes where we've had to), it can turn into a really major undertaking.

The request:

Ideally, I'd like an alternative for editing mass group/forum permissions when it's necessary. Personally, I'd be quite happy with an enormous master list that can be edited all in one go and saved when I'm done with it. The current mothod is great for small changes, but we, at least, have the potential for semi-frequent major changes being needed.

I imagine a request like this, if it gets done at all, would be waiting on version 5. In the meantime, I'm probably going to be asking questions over in the coding forum to see if I can put together at least a partial solution for ourselves (if I can modify the Create New Usergroup page to add an option for default group permissions, that would probably fix the most frequent headache).

Thoughts? Anyone else have problems like this, or are we just a fringe use case?