Custom Profile Field Visibility

[lilroo503]

Today I went and added a custom profile field.  My goal was to have the setting visible and changeable only by staff.  I'm going to be using this as a number field that staff can increment each time the user completes a certain action for us.  This needs to be separate from reputation and content count.

Unless I'm missing something, you can either set it so both the user and staff can see the field or so that only staff can see the field.  If you choose the latter, it is ONLY accessible from within the ACP.  I might have staff without ACP access that should be able to edit this field (and it's also just a huge convenience factor to not log into the ACP for such a simple task).  If you choose the former, the user can see the value.  This isn't what I want either.

If I remember correctly from my time on the 3.X series, I think it was possible to achieve a field visible and editable to staff on the front-end, but hidden to all users including the specific user himself.  Can this be brought back?

[lilroo503]

Any thoughts on this?  If nobody has a desire for this feature (returning?), I'll figure out some alternative to what I'm planning.

[RazorSEdge]

I found this thread while searching for something else, and yes, it is important.  I was actually going to be making a post about this here in the next day or so.

These settings being changed have effectively broken how we do a lot of things on our site with CPF's.  To get around some of the issues we have had to switch from using CPF's for certian things like ranks/positions within a gaming division and creating a member group for each rank/position instead.  This has resulted in us going from 3-6 member groups per gaming division to literally a couple dozen or more just to accomplish what we could in 3.4.x.  However, using member groups only helps once we finish coding it to show secondary groups in topic view, etc.

Even then, member groups is a band-aid to a problem, that wasn't a problem in 3.4.x.  For instance, our members in our gaming divisions are assigned a "unit number"  Now, that number is assigned by staff, and should only be editable by staff, but view-able by everyone.  That, is no longer possible since now the only options make it either "Staff Only Edit = No One Can View" or "Member can edit = chaos if things get edited when only staff should edit them".