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How to hide a user from member list
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Roberto Villabona
Member
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May 24, 2013 - 2:06 pm

Hi,

I just installed Simple:Press a day ago and am really liking it.

There's one thing I can't figure out how to do though -- is there a way to hide a specific user from being shown in the member list (or any other forum function that shows member names)?  I would really like to hide my WP admin user from the forum users.

I've searched the forum but couldn't find a similar topic to this, so apologies if this has been asked and answered.  Thanks!

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Mr Papa
Simi Valley, CA
SP Master
Free Members
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May 24, 2013 - 3:06 pm

you want to hide an admin? frankly, no one has ever mentioned anything like that so not something you could easily do... certainly you can do some with filters, but nothing globally...

can you explain the use case of hiding your forum admins? the name looks just like any other name in the forum...

in the members list, you could hook into 'sph_members_list_records' and remove (unset) the record array element if its an admin or your user id... probably similar hooks in most locations...

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Roberto Villabona
Member
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Jun 18, 2013 - 9:32 pm

Hi, I'm back.  I took the time to get myself well-acquainted with the software first before I continued.

Basically I just wanted to hide the WP admin, not the forum admin.  In my set-up I had planned on having a WP admin user that doesn't do forum administration (or even participation), and so I thought there really was no reason for his name to appear on the member list of forum users.  But I do understand that SP was designed to be well-integrated with WP and so it's a feature I could live with.  I just basically gave the admin users (hopefully) nondescript display names to prevent others from seeing their login IDs.

I've set it up as well so users have their Display Names shown instead of their WP username for those who presumably care to have the latter hidden.

However I did see a way forum users can still figure out someone's WP username -- when you click on any user name to see his profile, a modal box comes out to show the basic info.  When you hover over the link "View Full Profile for <display-name>", the URL used by the link is /<website-name>/forum/profile/<wp-username>.  This negates the efforts to try to hide someone's login ID.  

Would you be aware of a workaround to this?  I'm actually thinking of using Pretty Link Pro to though I still have to do research on whether that's what it was designed to do (might be overkill given the feature list).  For now I've set it up so users can't view other users' profiles though I would like to be able to open that up someday.

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Mr Papa
Simi Valley, CA
SP Master
Free Members
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Jun 18, 2013 - 9:54 pm

bit more clear now that you have distinguished between wp and sp admins... ;)

but there is no reason why a wp admin user has to show up in the members list...  just dont give the wp admin user membership in any sp usergroup (and do not make it an sp admin)...  then, if using the default members list structure, users will never see that user since they will only be able to see other users in the same usergroup(s) as themselves...

figuring out the wp username is not rocket science nor does wp consider it any kind of security leak...  yes, the sp profile will link to their profile via the username...  just to be clear, when I you (and thusly myself) use the term username, I assume you really mean the wp user_login (what wp really calls the field)...  and we have no built in method for using other than the user login for the profile...  but the profile link is hookable via a filter... so if you had another plugin or profile structure (ie from buddypress or other plugin), you could make the forum profile use those urls instead...

sorry, I have no idea what pretty link pro is or what it does...

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Roberto Villabona
Member
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Jun 20, 2013 - 10:44 am

Thanks again, Mr. Papa.  I didn't even know you could take a WP member out of any membership from SP groups until you told me.  I guess I just assumed that when the WP->SP association is made automatically (based on what I defined) then membership to any SP group wasn't optional.

I'm not a PHP programmer (used to do C/C++/shell/Pascal/SQL etc many, many years ago) but reading through the SP API docs is motivating me to go learn.  I really like how cleanly designed the hooks and API are.  Simple:Press is easily one of the best software purchases (if you can call it that) I made in a while.  I will most likely sign up as a member again when my silver membership expires. 

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Yellow Swordfish
Glinton, England
SP Master
Offline
Jun 20, 2013 - 2:54 pm

Glad you got it sorted out. Yes - the user relationships to forums is far more sophisticated and allows for a large flexibility in the way access is controlled. Might be worth looking at the 'Getting Started' section of the codex as well.

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