Corrupt Permissions - Table Cross Associations Missing!!

Thanks for looking at this, Smartys.

Hmmm...  Well I wonder why when I 'rebuilt' (so-to-speak) the Validating Group that the new Validating Group then was included with the rest of the forum_id associations when it was not before?

In the BB it looked like this... 
   1) when going into Administration:Forums, selecting an older forum, and then observing the Groups listed, Validating Group should have the 'read attribute' appearing as Red with no checkmark, and it did,
   2) but what it was appearing as for recent forums was greyed out, with a checkmark in the greyed out box (when it should be same as in #1, to be sure).
   3) If I created a group with same attributes as Validating it would demonstrate the Red Highlighting with no checkmark, as it should, in old or new Forums lised in Administration.
   4) But if I edited the existing Validating Group, saved it, and then edited it back to original settings it would still appear greyed out, with a checkmark in there.  (I expected it might 'correct' itself if I edited it, but it did not).
   5) Deleting it and recreating it, as described in my original post, corrected it...

...but so many others are messed up as well, including Guest, Member, Moderator, and, well, I am uncertain yet about Administrator.  And how would I fix those if need be?
So I am trying to figure out just what this problem is and how to globally fix it?
Do you see the problem?  If its, as you say, not table corruption, then what is that exactly??

I will go look now. 
So you think that although redoing a fresh group allows the appearance to display correctly,
and even though this also creates different entries in the database (which seem to correct the problem),
that the admin_forums.php file might be the problem and not the database?

I will go check that out and edit this post in a couple minutes with repsonse to your question.

OKAY, I checked and the only mod to it is to add the "parent_forum_id" from I believe it is the sub-forum mod, which was added forever ago (Sep 22, 2006 to be precise), so I think I would have observed problems long before now if it was the culprit.

Validating Group was originally made long time ago last year based on guest (who have read permissions set to on), and then all permissions including read were turned off.  So guests can view certain public forums, but 'validating' users get nothing... they have to wait for the admin to custom setup their profiles.  Iknow, it sounds weird, but its the way she wants to handle it.

Anyway, I am going to look at the admin_groups.php file and see what's up there  as well.

Then your story doesn't add up, since what you're describing doesn't seem possible given the code.
I would need admin access, the ability to execute SQL queries, and information about a specific group currently having this issue in order to determine anything more.

I clicked on your email link and sent you something.  Did you get it?  Is this something you wish to do and have time for?

I just sent you an email ...including some snapshots and some descriptions.
Oh and btw, Willow (the admin for the forum) just came up and showed me how Validating is still messed up for some other forums 8^(

You may wish to include looking at the forums under the category "SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP" where she just had to turn off Post Replies for Validataing, and also you will see the greyed out check box with the checkmark in it in those forums.

What a disaster this is.

Thanks so much for looking & helping.

Hmmm... but we used to give Guests read permissions, but right now if you turn that on you will observe they see Forums Christina, Two Hawks, and a small group, in the list (when not logged in, right)... and you cannot turn that off... but we always were able to before.

Whoa, wait a minute... I think that was something Willow did, I can turn that off...

Because somebody checked the box to enable them

Nope, it doesn't make sense, assuming that's the only thing you did

        // Now lets copy the forum specific permissions from the group which this group is based on
        $result = $db->query('SELECT forum_id, read_forum, post_replies, post_topics FROM '.$db->prefix.'forum_perms WHERE group_id='.intval($_POST['base_group'])) or error('Unable to fetch group forum permission list', __FILE__, __LINE__, $db->error());
        while ($cur_forum_perm = $db->fetch_assoc($result))
            $db->query('INSERT INTO '.$db->prefix.'forum_perms (group_id, forum_id, read_forum, post_replies, post_topics) VALUES('.$new_group_id.', '.$cur_forum_perm['forum_id'].', '.$cur_forum_perm['read_forum'].', '.$cur_forum_perm['post_replies'].', '.$cur_forum_perm['post_topics'].')') or error('Unable to insert group forum permissions', __FILE__, __LINE__, $db->error());

Of course, if you went and edited forums afterwards, it might have added entries for the forums you edited