Support Forum

Changed permission ranking on PM plugin?

DH Dietmar Herian
Dietmar Herian
Member

Hi SP-team,

so far, we were driving our forum using double memberships for standard users – they are in ‘guests’ (no pm permission) and ‘members’ (pm permission). And this worked very well – as soon as they were registered members, they could access pm.

Without any change in admin settings (as my co-admins say), standard users are suddenly blocked out of pm. As soon as I remove the guest membership from their account, they are back to biz. Obviously, the lower membership is dominating now the higher one and overrides the pm permission. 

My question: was there a recent change in this behaviour? Or what else could have caused this?  What happens when I delete the (not needed) ‘guests’ user group?

We are still running on SP 5.1.4 and PM plugin 1.4

Thanks for help!

 

23 Answers

New Answer

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member

no nothing has changed here… if they get a permission from one membership it doesnt matter what the others are…  the ‘best’ permission wins… always been this way…

I wouldnt recommend deleting a guests group… guests (including bots) have to go somewhere… on forum – usergroups – map users to user groups, you need to define a default usergroup for guests…

just to check, on same panel, you are not limiting users to single usergroup, right?

DH Dietmar Herian
Dietmar Herian
Member

No, we don’t!

But just recognized on the same screen that in ‘select mapping criteria’ the checkbox for ‘replace all memberships with single membership per WP role’ is checked and won’t let me uncheck it or change to ‘add membership per WP role to existing memberships’ . When I try to do this, the page refreshes and returns with the checkbox checked again.

And the checkbox for limitting to single usergroups is still unchecked!

How can this be caused?

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member

I would need to check with Mr Papa to be 100% certain – or need to set up some test data which will take me quite a while to do. But – as pretty clearly stated – that bottom panel is a task not an option setting. If you set the options you want and click on the ‘Map Users’ button then it is going to do what it says. The fact that it reloads the page with different options set is – I believe – simply setting them back to the defaults. The task itself should have been performed.

DH Dietmar Herian
Dietmar Herian
Member

Thanks for your reply!

If it was executed, then it did not do what I expected because all users with this double membership are still not able to do PM – meaning the lower membership ‘guests’ still dominates

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member

I am going to have to confer with Mr Papa later on but in the meantime it might be useful – of you are willing – to allow us to take a look at your SP setup in the admin? That would need to be a user with SP Admin status so we could look at user groups and permissions etc.

If that is going to be possible then please PM credentials to both myself and to ‘Mr Papa’. Please include in the PM a link to your site, a link to this thread and brief reminder of the problem. And one of us will take a look for you.

The obvious question has to be what changed? Clearly it wasn’t an update to either core SP or the PM plugin as you have not performed the updates available. And that really just suggests a data change of some sort…

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member

One of the things I wanted to look at I can not because the account you made is not an SP admin. But you CAN look.

Please pop up a users profile – any member who is in both Guests and Members user groups. Beside their name at the very top you should have the opportunity to edit their profile. This option is only available to forum admins. Please select to edit and when the profile forms become available click on the ‘permissions’ tab. Select a forum that you know has access for both Guests and Members and see what the setting is for using the PM system. I want to find out if it is being calculated correctly.

DH Dietmar Herian
Dietmar Herian
Member

Sorry for my mistake – I made it a moderator account.

How can I make an admin account?

Anyhow, the permissions are calculated correctly, the display shows the members abilities. But in the ‘private messages’ settings under pm user statistics it is still shown as ‘can PM: no’.

I sent a test pm to him and it was sent without error message but never received by the recipient. And the message is not in the database.

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member

you make it an sp admin account on forum – admins – manage admins…

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member

Going to have to chew this one over here as I can’t see anything incorrectly set up.

So – Steve – any thoughts? As far as I can see the data is correct – user groups/permissions etc…

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member

dont think I will have time tonight to log in and look… after 3 weeks vacation, getting slammed at work…  but if the settings all look correct, then probably need to do one of two things…  one, set up  test site similar – always test multiple usergroup membership with ‘conflicting’ permissions, but dont necessarily check pms – and would want to recheck the best permission logic…  two, in order to see what might be going on, ftp access to the site would be required for adding some debug code…

but wait on number 2 until we verify number 1…  hopefully Andy or I tomorrow…

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member

just set up a test with a user and multiple memberships… the best permission works correctly for the pm permission…

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member

whoa… just reread your first post… and think we all might have overlooked something…

you said you gave them guest permission…  guests by definition are not allowed to send private messages – how could they?  they dont have an account/inbox/etc…  and if you look at the permissions panel, there is an icon next to the pm permission that says the permission is ignored for guests…

but being in the guests usergroup and being identified as a guest can be two different things… 

do you have this guests usergroup mapped to the default guests group?

do you get the same result if you try a similar dual membership but not have one of them linked to the default guests usergroup? (ie copy the guests usergroup to another usergroup and assign that new usergroup as the default usergroup for guests)… I will try to run similar testing…