Not really sure what you asking for however. being an ‘admin’ means that you do not have to belong to any user groups because your forum access is global and total. You can surely mix in with your members freely as if you were just an ordinary member. 

What – specifically – were you asking for?

I need to be a part of the usergroups so that I am also a regular member, not just like an “Overlord”. I am unable to add myself to any usergroups because I am the Administrator. It appears this also means I am not eligible for awards and rewards? This separates me from my member base and does not allow me to participate among my friends with the features of the forum. So, in this context I actually am not able to mix freely with my members, and am quite separate.

I’m assuming this is not possible or you would have answered me in the above post? I guess I have to delete all my forums and start over

Edit: To add to this, there really needs to be a warning before install that the Administrator will not be able to participate in all the features of the forum, because this is not so in other forums such as phpBB3, and so it is not expected behavior

I still don’t understand your point, What features can you NOT participate in? I can’t think of any… so please do tell me.

Ok, I can see we are having a communication barrier here I will try.

But first, I have to share that I have deleted my forums that I spent quite a bit of time last night and this morning setting up to try and get it to where I could be put into usergroups, and then I logged in with another Admin account and I have just spent the last hour re-setting them up, only to find that my personal user name is still not in the list of “Eligible Members”! This is very frusterating, and my time could have been saved if someone could have told me that no WP Admins are eligible?

An important part of a lot of social forums are groups, like what BuddyPress has. A lot of forum go-ers like to display what group they are a part of under their name and in their profile, as well as be listed in all of the groups they are a part of. I will be using usergroups not only as a permissions tool, but as a way of labeling certain groups to give them prestige, honor, accommodation (only certain people can be in THIS group) and to allow people to display with pride that they are a part of this group or a part of that group. This is how I am accustomed to regular forums, such as phpbb3 behaving, it’s how I set up my bbPress, and it’s what I’m working towards with Simple Press. Of course each of these groups have their own forums.

I can not take part in this social functionality of my site with the current setup of Simple Press.

Admins of WordPress apparently are unable to join groups in Simple Press. I say “unable”, yes, try to understand this is a want, there is a social function to this. I do not want to be a god-like presence on my forums that can only do and go wherever I want, such as is convenient in a site that is setup for pure functionality, I want to be a part of my social site, a regular member who can join groups and display with pride which groups I am in. My members need to be able to look upon me as if I am a regular member just like them.

I hope I am making more sense; I do not know a better way to explain it.

I am willing to make database changes to make this happen. I am not, however, willing to give up my main username and the stats attached to it. I am also the author of my site, and I’ve published a number of articles. Can anyone think up a workaround where I can be a part of the Simple Press usergroup functionality with my own user name?

Edit: Can you list usergroups in the stats? Can you make members of usergroups different colors? I thought Mr Papa said you could, but I could be mistaken

I think the first thing to say is that it is pointless comparing Simple:Press to other forums. It works the way it does. Other forums work the way they do.

You also seem a little confused between Simple:Press ‘admins’ and WordPress ‘administrators’. They are not the same thing. An SP Admin does npt have tp be a WP administrator. That is up to you.

User Groups are intended as a mean to control access and security – not really to partition your users for other purposes. You can, of course, use them this way but it is not the intention. We use, on this site, special forum ranks for this purpose which we feel are a little more flexible.

However, if you want to keep doing things the way you appear to want to do them then I would suggest you simply create a separate, new login. Make that new account an SP Admin. Then log in as that new admin and remove your current user from Admin status and assign them to whatever user group(s) and membership level you want.

not sure what you cant do either…   you can vote in polls, rate posts, get achievements, mention or be mentioned, share, etc…  so we might be able to advise more if we knew what you wanted to do…

if its a big deal, then go the other way…  make your user with history an sp moderator…  give him membership in  special usergroup that gets all permissions and give this user all the sp admin capabilities… then he will be able to do about 95% of the forum admin things…  for those other 5%, which you rarely will need for an up and running forum, create another user that you make an SP admin…  log in as that user when needed…

as Andy says, WP and SP admins are not the same thing… regular wp users (ie subscriber or other role) can be an sp admin…  Any WP admin can get membership in a usergroup too…  the only users who cannot are sp admins…

My intention in mentioning other forums is to explain my confusion in trying to access the functionality of Simple Press. My reasoning being if you understand a user’s struggles with settings that don’t feel intuitive it might help serve this customer and future customers. You said you didn’t know what I was talking about: I tried to explain using examples.

I’m not confused at all by the difference between WP Admins and SP Admins, what I’m confused about is why SP automatically segregates all of my WP Admins. Are you aware that none of my WP Admins can be put into SP usergroups? If I am to understand what Mr Papa is saying, none of this is permanent and I will not have to make database changes, but that I should be able to go into SP permissions and demote these WP Admins in SP? I’ve already said I have a separate Admin username that can be the main SP Admin.

To answer the question “what can’t I do” one of the answers to that, is I can’t be listed as a top poster. I simply don’t show up in the list.

I didn’t realize that you guys use Ranks to display Groups. So this means to recreate the BuddyPress Group setting I need to create the UserGroup for the private forum permissions, then create the Rank so the user can display their Group?

I’m not sure I follow too well here either, what do you mean by ‘demote these WP Admins in SP’ ?

and I think with things like ‘Top Posters’, it is not that you are removed so much as not included in the first place because I believe it looks at members, not admins or mods.

I am not sure what you dislike about my suggestion in post #6 above which would work just fine.

I am afraid I also am unsure what you mean by the phrase that has confused Ike.

As to users in a WordPress ‘Administrator’ role then Simple:Press treats them as any other user without preference or prejudice. There are no known issues with this and none that I can find in testing.

And – now you are starting to talk about things you feel you can not do as an Simple:Press Admin perhaps we can concentrate on that instead. So – Admins not being a part of Top[ Posters. That can be changed very easily with a standard WP filter and 2 or 3 lines of code in your SP theme spFunctions.php file. Which we would be happy to supply of course.

Ike said
I’m not sure I follow too well here either, what do you mean by ‘demote these WP Admins in SP’ ?

Demote them because they seem to automatically be put in some category when I installed Simple Press where I am unable to find them in the list when I am pulling users into usergroups. So when I say “demote” I am asking if there is a place in Simple Press where they’ve been automatically made Moderators and I can demote them to regular members.

Ike said
and I think with things like ‘Top Posters’, it is not that you are removed so much as not included in the first place because I believe it looks at members, not admins or mods.

Exactly! Now we are on the same page, except I’m still having a hard time explaining that I don’t want to be separated from my members; I’d like to be included in the top posters list, and so I’m looking for a way to make that happen. I need my username to be a regular member, that is all I’m trying to accomplish here. If you see above, I am trying to verify if that is possible.

Yellow Swordfish said

As to users in a WordPress ‘Administrator’ role then Simple:Press treats them as any other user without preference or prejudice. There are no known issues with this and none that I can find in testing.

This is not happening in my instance, and perhaps is the cause of the bulk of our misunderstandings. My WP Admins aren’t found in the usernames list when I go to pull users into usergroups in SP Admin:

 EDIT: On thinking about this further, what’s probably happened is when SP was uninstalled and deleted, and then reinstalled and it kept my original WP Admin as #1 SP Admin, I then had both WP Admins as SP Admins, so neither show up in the list even though I never assigned them.

Yellow Swordfish said
I am not sure what you dislike about my suggestion in post #6 above which would work just fine.

I did not say I dislike it. If you read my post a few up, I am asking for clarification:

Halo Diehards said
I didn’t realize that you guys use Ranks to display Groups. So this means to recreate the BuddyPress Group setting I need to create the UserGroup for the private forum permissions, then create the Rank so the user can display their Group?

However, now that I read that, I see what I wrote is exactly what I do and I’m not sure why I wrote it. I must have been tired and still figuring it out.

So… 

Back to my original question, “Can I change who is #1 SP Admin”, just to answer this in case anyone finds this in a search: at this time you cannot.

I thought from part of the response up there that there might be a way to do it, but going into the settings, I see that there’s not. I’m looking at “Manage Admins” as I write this, and what’s happened is when I disabled and deleted Simple Press so I could be a regular member, then reinstalled it as a different user, it kept my main username from the first install as the #1 SP Admin anyway. This means I cannot “Remove All Capabilitiers from this Admin”. <<Not sure this would put me as a regular user anyway.

I’ve decided to just keep things as they are, because there are plenty bigger issues I’m dealing with in setting up the forums, and I don’t have the time and energy to continue to try and figure out this one. 

I added an edit to that last: I think I misunderstood that SP was auto-creating Admins from my WP Admins because I never actually chose my WP Admins to be SP Admins, but I was forgetting that SP kept my original WP Admin from the first install.

So I retract my statement that SP is creating SP Admins from my WP Admins. My apologies.

So, is everything good on the subject of admins?

And as Andy mentioned about the Top Posters, did you put any thought into this? There are things that can be done pretty easily to completely change things which is just one aspect of why SP is such a great forum plugin. All the templates can be modified for anything from complete overhaul, to including minor changes to the functions.