Wedge

From an admistrators point of view, if the forum is large with many moderator and admin categorys, say you got 9 cats a guest can view, 12 for members, 15 for lower mods, 18 for higher mods, 22 for site admins. Thats an emense amount of permissions to set by the board. How does profile settings converge on viewable cats/boards? If a new board is created in an admin cat, it automatically inherits the cats permissions. This comes from me and my site cause i have about 8-9 cats for all, and soon will have some for mods and then some for admins. It seems to me that having cat wide permissions would open some doors for stronger admining. The current way its still doable, this is just a request/suggestion. Maybe we can run a poll on it? See what the populous thinks.

Category level permissions are actually a pain in the arse, not a boon. Five years of forum management tells me this.

Permissions are already complicated enough in SMF, just with outside and inside boards stuff. Now you want to complicate it with a whole extra layer, which has performance concerns as well as practical ones.

Again, you can already do this almost entirely out of the box in SMF 2.0 without much in the way of work, especially since the odds of actually needing per category permissions are low, much much lower than per board permissions.

And before you tell me that I don't know how to do things differently, and don't know how to think outside the box (because I know where this will go otherwise), I should point out that I'm no stranger to designing permissions systems *from scratch*

And this last week I've been making it an order of magnitude more powerful by being able to create departments for that helpdesk which can have different permissions structures.

Design by committee... someone didn't do his assigned reading.

Once again, thats not what i meant, and im not trying to educate you. My observation was that if you have 10 boards in an admin cat, it might be made more simple to check one set of permissions rather than 10 to see if the cat should be visible or not. Performance wise, this does seem more efficiant, but there may very well be conditions outside my own personal scope making my summarization inaccurate. Everything i say isnt an attack on ones intelegence. :)

-sigh-

OK, so let's back up a bit to what's already been implemented, is already available and proven to work.

You create a profile. This is a set of permissions that applies in a board. You just set which boards you want to use this. Job done. This is even the case in SimpleDesk though it's an order of magnitude bigger.

No need for making a whole new level of permissions, complexity and confusion for the sake of saving time in the minority of cases. Not everyone is building huge forums that have tens of categories and dozens of boards.How can it possibly be more efficient if it has to look in 3 places (outside boards, inside cats, inside boards) for permissions instead of 2 (outside boards, inside boards)?


As for not being an attack on intelligence, maybe not, but I'd think that maybe I'd have learnt something in 5 years as a forum admin, that I used when building my own systems, that I'd be using here. I'd also assume that I wouldn't retry things I've already tried hoping for a different result... you've made the suggestion, which is awesome, except that experience trumps ideas in this case.

Thank you arantor. I really dont mean to piss arantor off. It just so darn easy. Maybe i can try to piss him off and hell laugh. :)

Pete, speaking of permission profiles... I don't remember if anyone suggested that in the related private topic, but what about this change? UI wise it would make sense to edit permissions and fine-tuning per group, rather than edit membergroups and fine-tune permissions for each of them... Imagine that, instead of having "Post new topic (yes) (no)", you had "Post new topic: (regular members - yes no) (moderators - yes no) (group 1 - yes no)"... We could simply show the group names through JavaScript, to save on the page load. We could also add a "check all" checkbox above "yes" and above "no", things like that... Then, permissions that are set the same for all groups would show "yes" or "no" in bold, so that one could easily find permissions that are set differently for each group. Plenty of things that could be done via JS really...

I think we covered that actually, because some areas in SMF already present their options in that fashion (in addition to the permissions area itself)

Where?

:lol: :lol: :lol:

the only thing that does not suit me personally in a system of permits smf
a group moderator board
why someone has decided for me (and limited set of rights) that may or may not do the moderator in him board?

Calendar is the canonical example.

You mean, area=managecalendar;sa=settings?
It's not really related to perms, although I see what you mean...
But I was thinking of having everything into one page really.

I miss a lot of forum management from phpBB3 in SMF. Yeah I know it can be complicated but once you know how it works, it's kinda easy. I setup a board for someone else and searched for some things and was irritated that I couldn't found a simple thing I searched for.

phpBB is easy?! Both phpBB 2 and phpBB 3 confused the hell out of me.