We've all commented in the past about the inanity of 'Regular Members', about the various issues with it and so on.
While working on the member groups configuration page, it just occurred to me - what if, for the sake of argument, Regular Members were to be an actual physical group?
It's not, in any real sense of the word, a physical group. You can't rename it. It doesn't show up on the left anywhere (which is, mostly, the reason for it being a phantom group). Users often want to put users into a specific group on registration - why not make it so they actually DO go into a physical group at registration rather than this phantom group?
Other than having to tweak some of the display code, not to mention some of the management logic (like preventing users deleting it, and to prevent it being changed to another kind of group), I see no reason not to do this.
On the flip side, it would allow you to do things you currently can't - you can't currently set the list of boards accessible to Regular Members as a whole group. You have to do that one board by board, even in SMF, because the edit-membergroup page only works on cases where the group id is 2 or 4+ (global moderator and any group that isn't guests, regular members, admin and board moderators)
I'd love to hear more opinions on this, especially from people who know the code base. I don't see that it should affect things that significantly anywhere.
While working on the member groups configuration page, it just occurred to me - what if, for the sake of argument, Regular Members were to be an actual physical group?
It's not, in any real sense of the word, a physical group. You can't rename it. It doesn't show up on the left anywhere (which is, mostly, the reason for it being a phantom group). Users often want to put users into a specific group on registration - why not make it so they actually DO go into a physical group at registration rather than this phantom group?
Other than having to tweak some of the display code, not to mention some of the management logic (like preventing users deleting it, and to prevent it being changed to another kind of group), I see no reason not to do this.
On the flip side, it would allow you to do things you currently can't - you can't currently set the list of boards accessible to Regular Members as a whole group. You have to do that one board by board, even in SMF, because the edit-membergroup page only works on cases where the group id is 2 or 4+ (global moderator and any group that isn't guests, regular members, admin and board moderators)
I'd love to hear more opinions on this, especially from people who know the code base. I don't see that it should affect things that significantly anywhere.