If I understand you correctly – and I think I do – then it sounds like you need to go to tje forum admin > user groups > map users to user groups – and turn in the option at the top – ‘Users are limited to single user group membership’. Then – when the ranking kicks in to promote a user after their X number of posts, they will be moved into the new user group and not copied into it,.

Is that what you are after?

That’s basically what I’m after but some of them are in 2 groups and neither group can see the other (unless they are in both obviously). Trouble is some of these groups are not controlled by rank.

This particular forum has been running for 5 years and I’ve only been on the job a few months, I’m spending all my time cleaning up ex-admins mess.

When you say ‘some of them are in 2 groups’, isn’t this only going to be for new members? If so my understanding is that the change will only affect members who go through the first 2 post moderation after the settings are enabled..

It’s a little more complicated than that Ike, unfortunately.

The way the groups are set is

New member 2 posts to enter member group, the member group is normal forum access, this is the only group change by rank, all other ranks offer no group change.

Then there are 2 hidden groups, both are invitation only so no promotions with rank.

In the 2 hidden groups the members of 1st hidden group (9 users) are also members of the 2nd hidden group (150 users). The 1st hidden group is a club which does not allow others in or to view their meetings and must remain separate. Members of both these groups are also normal members, so in effect 9 users are in 3 groups and 150 users are in 2 groups. Normal members are only in 1 group. I know I can control them all with permission sets but the hidden groups need to remain intact.

If it wasn’t for the WP roles this would be pretty straight-forward, if I could remove the WP roles from the SP plugin then I’m sure that would solve the problem. Can it be done?

I am not completely sure I understand what the problem actually is here. if you are not using the WP roles to differentiate these users – and most people in my experience do not – and these two special groupings are by invite, then it seems that you do have to perform manual movements of users into their respective user groups and clearly need to allow users yo belong to more than one user group.

So you need to use the Add New / Move-Delete tools on the main user group listing page. Or am I still missing something please?

I’ll have to come back to this another time, it’s blowing my bipolar brain to bits. I can live with manual role changing for a day or 2 there’s only bots joining atm lol.

How else but manually could it be done? Your other basic option is to use some sort of membership plugin that also changes WP roles that can in turn change SP user group memberships but that would still probably require manual intervention within the membership data.

Hi YS I’m used to stand alone’s and that’s probably why this is blowing my mind to be fair.

I’ll end up trying to configure this on my dev server to see if I can figure it out, that way I can’t do any harm to the clients forum. Thanks for the input all the same.

we will be here…  let us know what you find or if you have some more questions…