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I posted earlier asking how to promote newly registered members to "Senior" status on my forum, since I have a lot of people re-registering who were on my old forum...and who have been trusted members for years. I followed the instructions and moved the members from "Guest" or "New Member" status to "Senior Member" status. This does place the members in the "Senior Member" group, but it doesn't actually give them the full access I've assigned to that group. So, while I've set up the Senior Member group to have full access to PM, viewing/posting/editing own posts, uploading avatars and putting images in posts, those members aren't actually able to do any of those things and are basically as restricted as a brand new guest registrant is. ???
When I pull up the list of members, I see that the newly registered folks are listed in both the Guests group AND the Senior Members group. Even deleting them from Guests after moving them to Senior Members doesn't help. This creates a dilemma, as I do not want to change the WP role for any forum members to anything above "subscriber," but it looks like the forum software will not allow them full access unless they are assigned a greater WP role or unless they post 100 times to gain Senior Member status in the ranking system. But that's not great, either, since I don't want my Senior Members to have to work their way up the rankings like newcomers do.
What can I do?
Thanks,
Jennie
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The first question has to be are these relationships between User Groups and Permission Sets set up correctly in each forum. If you go to Manage Forums and look at the permissions set up for each one are the 'Senior members' set up correctly to the Permission set with greater access?
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YELLOW
SWORDFISH
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Yes, permissions are set correctly for each forum. Senior Members are set at "full access" in all but the Moderators board (which has "no access" for anyone except mods). Yet my newly-minted Senior Members are unable to do anything other than post in the Intro Board (which provides "Limited Access" to Guests and New Members--meaning they can post something that an admin then has to approve).
Again, when I look at my member list, I see that Senior Members are also listed as "Guests" or "New Members" instead of just as Senior Members. This seems to limit their permissions, as the software appears to default to "Guest" or "New Member" status instead of recognizing them as real Senior Members.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Jennie
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We may as well deal with both of your issues together as they are probably related.
First off we have a very large number of users who make extensive use of the user groups/permissions access control (as we actually do on this site as we have a couple of exclusive moderator forums as well) and as far as we are aware at this moment in time there are no known bugs.
Secondly - just to clarify - if a user appears in more than one User Group (which means they were 'copied' instead of 'moved') they will actually benefit from the most open permissions available not the most closed. But I would recommend - by the sound of things - limiting your users to single user Group memberships.
So - clearly something is amiss somewhere. Let's try this first. Go to the forum admin > Toolbox > Housekeeping and click on the option to 'reset the auths' cache.
By the way - is this SP 5.1.4 ? And are you using any plugins to do with membership/roles etc?
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YELLOW
SWORDFISH
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Really appreciate the swift reply. I've reset the auths cache as instructed. Don't know yet if this is helping folks. I'll have to have a "Senior Member" test and let me know. I didn't copy people to another group--I clicked the "Move/Delete" button after selecting members from the "Guests" list and choosing "Senior Members" from the box. So I'm really not sure what's going on here.
Next, I don't really want to limit people to one group membership, as I have some sub-forums that are only for certain users. For instance, I have a special board for folks who have been on a historical costuming tour with me, and I'd like to add Senior Members to that group and have them be able to read and post in that sub-forum. If I limit them to a single group membership (Senior Members), then I can't grant them access to the special sub-forum.
Finally, here's the full list of plugins I'm running (all from Simple:Press):
- Admin Bar
- Birthdays
- Tiny MCE
- File Uploader with Plupload
- Post Preview
- Private Message System
- Profanity Filter
- Report Post
- Subscriptions
- Upload Viewer
That's it. Thanks again!
Jennie
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PS - This is SP 5.1.4, which I installed last week. Thanks.
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Understood on the multiple groups.
I was really meaning any WP membership or role plugins. I was asking because we do know one or two have caused problems with user group/member mapping in the past. I am concerned that you have users in the Guest group. This is unusual and normally the Guest group is there more as a 'virtual' group to handle everyone not a member.
Let's see what your users have to say...
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YELLOW
SWORDFISH
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Gotcha. The only membership plugin I added to WP was the "Multisite User Management" (recommended here, too), as newly registered members weren't showing up in the Member lists on the forum at all. Now they show up and are given subscriber status by default (I really don't want higher levels in my WP back end). All new subscribers are dumping into "Guests," as we wanted a group with absolutely no permissions other than viewing the list of boards in the forum and posting in the Intro board (but not appearing until a mod approves the post). Should I have left the Guests group alone and had people automatically go to "New Members" instead? The ranks I've set up are as follows:
- New Member: Up to 5 posts
- Junior Member: Up to 25 posts
- Senior Member: Up to 100 posts
I named the ranks and the member groups the same. Is this, perhaps, what is causing the problem? I thought naming them the same thing would make it easier to remember permissions, etc.
Thanks for the help.
Jennie
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Well I don't see anything obviously wrong there. perhaps using the Guests group is a little odd as that means you have to manually move people to their initial group where they can post but that is a choice you have of course.
So - seems to be OK so we await judgement from a user then!
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YELLOW
SWORDFISH
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Okay, I had a Senior Member login and test, and she was able to post in the other forums, so at least the permissions are working. The problem is that she can still see threads in the Mods' board, which is supposed to be totally unreadable to anyone other than mods. She can't click to read threads in that board, but she can see the thread names, which is a big no-no, since I don't want any other users privy to what the mods are discussing.
Thanks!
Jennie
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