Wedge

Added a poll, and I encourage everyone to vote...

Very quiet here this evening...... :P

It doesn't help that I've been wrapped up in a bastard funk mood lately that has just flatlined my enthusiasm for just about everything :( It's just like I've been so overloaded with *stuff*, both digitally and in real life.

Also...Is redundant, since you can formulate drafts quite happily...

It's not exactly the same -- a draft is stored in a special area of your profile, while a 'privacy' draft is stored inside your forum/blog and you can access it easily until the moment you decide to make it public.
Would that be disorientig...?

Regarding the poll, it would seem that:
- a third of our users don't care about topic privacy settings,
- the rest does,
- everyone but you seems to be interested in multiple contact lists, rather than a single contact list.

I'm not sure I can make a decision based on a relatively small sample of users (11 people, 9 not including us.)
It's not like it's a piece of cake to implement this... Although it's not going to be a disaster, either :P

Oh, and regarding your post-moderation UI issues - how about you set it aside and come back to it in a month or two?

I think it would potentially be confusing to treat it as a draft, but personal posts I can see the logic of, e.g. blog post with very personal details.

Re moderation, I think I'm going to have to leave it for now and come back to it.

Also, one thing that I'd address: how many people are voting on what sounds useful vs what they would actually use if it were available...?

Both, not only does it sound useful but it is something I would use if it was implemented.

I think option one is the easiest, as any other combos really can be handled in Personal Messages.

Not if you want a poor man's helpdesk, for example... There are plenty of cases where you might want to allow multiple users but not everyone to see a given topic.

Good idea though: sending pms to a contact list :P

Now I have time to come back and look properly, I've realised I select the wrong option :unsure:

If I could change my vote, I'm torn between "same as SMF" (the one Pete voted for) and the "same as Google+ circles" below it. I can see value in both approaches.

Just to add, I think I'd vote "same as Google+ circles", with the caveat that while I wouldn't want ordinary members having these facilities available to them, I can see them being useful to staff.

It seems to me that what is wanted is the ability for the user to
* create user-controlled custom groups, to which the user can add whomever they want
* An option to automagically maintain a user-controlled custom group of "buddies"
* create user-controlled custom profiles, in which the user can specify whichever permission they want for each group (general or custom)
* create the ability to apply custom profiles to topics, rather than to boards. topics without profiles would use the board's profiles. Permission on any topic would be the most restrictive of the combination of board and topic permission. This will be tricky, combining all those A's, D's, and X's properly for people who are in multiple groups, where they might have A, D, and X permission on the same pouvoir.

SMF 2.0's interface for groups would work OK, but you would only want the current permissions profile interface available as "advanced permission setting" option.  You'd want a dead simple interfact that allows them to choose only "groups which can see this post", or whichever set of options you want to present, but then passes that information to a method that then either creates a proper permission profile, or else re-uses one of the standard permission profiles (which must be provided, and you cannot allow ADMIN to delete them, or else the whole thing breaks).

Actually, you'd be surprised at how straightforward it really becomes. Gather all the groups a user is in, and gather all the A/D/X values for all those groups. Ignore any D values, so you build a list of the A values that there are, and then eliminate any Xs from the list. It's really not a massive amount of code in the long run.

The real problem isn't even figuring out ADX permutations, the trick is to make it parsable in a fashion that means it can trivially be dropped in (or at least, insertable easily) into some of the existing queries and to do so without killing performance. The real hurt is going to come on things like unread and the message index where you have to evaluate a lot of topics at once, and even the stuff I did in SimpleDesk (which is verging on scary-complex, because that's author+staff, which is a trivially definable group and isn't set per topic but per board) isn't as complex as this is.

Yes, contact list are pretty much like membergroups in SMF...
In fact, Noisen.com offers (or used to offer -- I think I disable it) the ability for users to create their own custom membergroups, for which they'd then be able to give proper privacy settings. It did work, but I felt uncomfortable giving users access to the admin area, even if just for that particular membergroup page, plus it was a bit confusing to end users anyway.
That's why I want to go between the two opposites - and use a technique that's closer to what Facebook and Google+ have.
I don't know if I'll go all the way Ajax to manage your lists, but I can sure give it a try...

Anyway, the poll's results are now clearly pointing towards a contact list solution, and I'll deal with that later this week. I just don't know if I'll do it before or after the selectbox rewrite...