Moderators Permissions, Tracking and Issues

[Kelt0n]

Hey guys,

I kept searching the internet as well as these forums trying to figure out the answer to some questions and didn't really have any luck, so I decided I would open a topic here in hopes that someone knows if such features exist somewhere or if the things I consider as issues are valid ones or not.

Using the latest version 4.6.9, I encountered some issues related to moderators as follows:

1. To add moderators you go to the ACP, then find the Staff Moderators tab and click on the Add Moderator button which shows you the options to select a group or a member to give moderator access to and a save button. Once you click on save the moderator permissions are given the the respective group or member. This is common knowledge and nothing new here. My confusion here is the following: why is the default setting after you click the save button set to UNRESTRICTED? This gives that group, or person, unrestricted access to do whatever they please until you configure out the right access you wanted to give them. No matter how much I think about it, it doesn't make any sense to give unrestricted access even for a brief time until you manage to uncheck the correct permissions. Wouldn't it make more sense to set the default setting to RESTRICTED and THEN to be able to fiddle around with the permissions as you wish, not worrying that in the meantime the person might start deleting or editing content? Is there such a place where you can change the default setting? I haven't seen one unfortunately and it would be of great help.
2. Is there an option (since I haven't seen one) to be able to set default moderator permissions which you can apply when adding a new moderator? If you are managing a community where you need to change moderators regularly, it becomes quite tiresome to select each individual permission again and again for each new moderator. This wouldn't be a problem for smaller communities where you add one new moderator every couple of months, but what about larger communities where that is done every few days? I did have a plugin that did this but unfortunately it isn't fully compatible with 4.6.9 and causes loading issues so I am not using it anymore.
3. This is an issue I have seen even from IPS 4 and I thought at some point it might get fixed but it is still here. I don't remember it being on IPS 3. The issue takes place when someone is part of a group that has moderator access AND that person is given individual moderator permissions (basically selecting the Member option when clicking the Add Moderator button) to another section of the forum. If you do this, that person will lose the moderator access to the group they are part of. This doesn't really make any sense as to why that person can't have both moderator permissions depending on where the moderator status was set. To better understand I will give an example: let's say we have a category called Cars, which is moderated by the group Car Moderators. John is part of the Car Moderators group, so he can moderate that category. Let's say we have another category called Boats, which isn't moderated by a group. If I want to add John as an individual moderator, John will have moderator access there but will no longer have moderator access to Cars. Can't you see a problem here? I mean, I could create another group called Boat Moderators and put John in that group as well and it would work just fine, but what if I only need to add one person moderator to that category? It wouldn't make any sense to create a new group just for one person. What if I have multiple such categories where only one person is needed as moderator? So the permissions shouldn't cancel each other out unless they were overlapping, meaning you set both the group Car Moderators as well as John to moderate the Cars category, which would be redundant since John already has the moderator permissions from the group. I hope you understand the issues... is there any way to fix this without having to create a new group for each category where you want to add just 1, 2 members as mods and you don't need a group for that?
4. Final one, I promise, is there a way to quickly find out which group or individual moderator is moderating a category/forum? I know there were (maybe there there still are) plugins that showed these details directly in the category/forum, but they don't seem to be fully compatible with 4.6.9. The plugin I was talking about with the moderators from point 1 did this job. On a large community how do you guys quickly find out who moderates a certain category. I guess you could name your moderator group the same as the category to be easier to find, but this is just a workaround and not really a solution, especially if you set individual moderators and not groups.
    

Thank you for your time.
Hopefully you don't see my message just as a rant, as I genuinely would like to find working solutions for these things or at least know that they might get a solution in future updates.

 

[Jim M]

1. Sorry, here in support I can only inform you on how the software operates today. If you have suggestions to change that, please post your suggestion in the Feature Suggestion forum.
2. I would advise assigning a group to the permissions you want then assigning that to each individual moderator.
3. The intended design would be that if you provide an individual member a moderator selection, it will indeed overwrite and group selections. If you have suggestions to change that, please post your suggestion in the Feature Suggestion forum.
4. There is not really something for this at this point in time. There is internal discussions about permissions and making it easier to see what groups or members have access to what. However, nothing is set in stone at this point in time or can I guarantee a release point of that. Due to that, like the above, I would recommend creating a suggestion for this as well. This way we can stay on top of it.

[IveLeft...]

Agree - Make a group for Moderator permissions and assign that group to the member either primary group if you want them to be visible mods or secondary group to remain hidden

[Kelt0n]

Thank you very much for the info. In my particular case unfortunately, the suggestion for number 2 doesn't work because I have to set moderator to individual people that aren't part of a group. I think I thought of a workaround for most of the things mentioned above by using Clubs.

I will leave the suggestions in the Suggestions forum, maybe at some point they are deemed useful and implemented in future versions.

 

Cheers!

[Marc]

6 minutes ago, Kelt0n said:

Thank you very much for the info. In my particular case unfortunately, the suggestion for number 2 doesn't work because I have to set moderator to individual people that aren't part of a group. I think I thought of a workaround for most of the things mentioned above by using Clubs.

I will leave the suggestions in the Suggestions forum, maybe at some point they are deemed useful and implemented in future versions.

 

Cheers!

No problem. Glad you found a workaround for what you need in any case