Best Group Practices

[The Dark Wizard]

Hey All,

As I watch a new test conversion take place and stare at the progress counter, I started to think, what are the best practices for member groups?

From my understanding from the guides and reading around:

• Members will not acquire styling from secondary groups, only primary.
• With the above point, that means Admins and Mods should have those respective groups as primary so that they acquire staff styling.
• It seems that the group system will favor positive permissions (yes) over negative permissions (no or not having it) or lower in terms of wait timers (because lower is positive)

On our previous software, we have for example a Supporter group that turns usernames gold, but it actually provides zero permissions (and we only wanted it for styling purposes) because the user is still primary "members"

It seems that on IPS, the user should have the primary group Supporter but secondary members in this situation to accomplish the following:

• Primary Group Supporter (to style usernames)
• Don't change any supporter permissions
• User gets the Members group as secondary (where all the forum permissions actually are)

Is this correct?

[opentype]

2 hours ago, The Dark Wizard said:

• Primary Group Supporter (to style usernames)
• Don't change any supporter permissions
• User gets the Members group as secondary (where all the forum permissions actually are)

Is this correct?

It should work, but you will still have to deal with two permission sets which can potentially be conflicting. “Don’t change any supporter permission” doesn’t mean that the primary group permissions don’t affect anything. There is no way to turn the permissions off. 
It’s probably easier to just have two primary groups. Create the second by copying the first. And if you ever want to make changes, apply them to both. 

[The Dark Wizard]

17 minutes ago, opentype said:

It should work, but you will still have to deal with two permission sets which can potentially be conflicting. “Don’t change any supporter permission” doesn’t mean that the primary group permissions don’t affect anything. There is no way to turn the permissions off. 
It’s probably easier to just have two primary groups. Create the second by copying the first. And if you ever want to make changes, apply them to both. 

By don’t change I meant as in leave it as default and unedited except for styling. So don’t apply any forum or group permissions to the supporter role. That way a supporter gets their permissions from the members secondary group (which is primary for non supporters and a majority of people)

if members can see forum xyz, then it sounds like I don’t need to duplicate that for supporter.

[Marc Stridgen]

There isnt really any 'best practice' for this, as its unique to the individual site. 

Your suggestion on how to set it sounds fine, however only if there is a situation where 'supporter' doesnt have any member permissions. If it's the case that every supporter gets the permissions of the member group, then you might as well set permissions on the supporter group

[The Dark Wizard]

1 minute ago, Marc Stridgen said:

There isnt really any 'best practice' for this, as its unique to the individual site. 

Your suggestion on how to set it sounds fine, however only if there is a situation where 'supporter' doesnt have any member permissions. If it's the case that every supporter gets the permissions of the member group, then you might as well set permissions on the supporter group

Ah.

Yeah, on our site, supporters don’t get anything extra, we don’t paywall any feature. In our previous software the explicit purpose of the supporter group is just to apply styling.

I’ll see about supporter just being a clone of Members then.

 

 

[Marc Stridgen]

No problem. Good luck with getting the permissions sorted 🙂 

[opentype]

2 hours ago, The Dark Wizard said:

That way a supporter gets their permissions from the members secondary group (which is primary for non supporters and a majority of people)

Which isn’t really possible, as I tried to say. In your scenario, the supporters are in a primary group AND a secondary group and you would have to manage BOTH permission sets. There is no way to tell the system to only look at the secondary group. ALL permissions in both groups will have to be set up in such a way where the secondary group always overrides the primary group – that can get messy. 

If it’s really just about username appearance, you might also look at third-party solutions or a custom plugin. It wouldn’t be hard to create a plugin which styles the user name based on a hidden profile field or something like that. This would avoid having to deal with all the group permissions. 

[Marc Stridgen]

It actually depends on your scenario to be fair. If for example, the only thing people cant see are forums other than one forum (an example I have used myself) then adding a second group just for permissions can work. It really depends no your own scenario. I certainly get what you are saying though