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PunBB Forums → PunBB 1.2 troubleshooting → Users in 2 Groups?
Can a person belong to two or more different user groups? I'd like to make private groups that only the members can see.
I've tried to make a test user a member of a user group and also a moderator of the forum that only that group can see, but after making the change and trying to login as the user I get:
You do not have permission to view these forums.
Go back
Can't see a single forum. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks.
You can't make users a member of more than one group.
Oh that's very disappointing. Is there a way to give users access to some forums but not others?
Yes, by putting them in a group 
*sigh*
PunBB really did look amazing untill I started looking into the group-system. I run a site with phpbb and have:
- several groups where some groups give access to hidden forums
and
- where some members belong to several groups
and
- where some moderators only moderate their specific forum dont have access to others etc ....
This will be completely hopeless to administrate in punbb since it litterally would be admin-hell if I did understand the punbb-group system correctly 
Hopefully this is something that will be "fixed" in v.1.3 since the simplicity and ease of this board looks amazing except for this one thing (for me that is).
Edit: ohh, read the interview, maybe 1.3 will be exactly what I'm looking for. Moderation rights set inside the group, however it said nothing about being able to be a member of several groups (hopefully that will be possible). Not saying awesome yet, but "time will show" (no, not "time will tell" 
).
froste: Assigning someone to the moderator group doesn't mean they can moderate forums. You need to assign them moderation rights to individual forums. You do this in the user's profile under administration. If I understand you correctly, the "only" feature you miss is being able to have users that are members of more than one group.
In my opinion, it wouldn't make sense for PunBB to be "lean and mean" and at the same time have a complex user group system with permission inheritance and whatnot.
uhm, this wasnt my question ... this was just a comment, however i started a thread about it but that one got closed ... with some rather lame comments from a mod.
Anyway... Under admin-rights you can search for users, and then when clicking the user you can administrate the user. Here you can assign what forums this moderator should moderate. So far, so good. Problem is, lets say I've got two seperate hidden forums, both of these should have their own moderator, this moderator should not have access to the other hidden forum. The little testing I've done shows this is hard to do with punbb, if I make both a moderator they will automatically be able to read the others forums, and they can moderate their own. I dont want this, and my users dont want this. I also tested this by removing access to moderators to group A, but at the same time in userconfig saying user X should moderate group Y, this didnt work ofc since this user couldnt access the forum he was supposed to moderate (it didnt show up for that user).
If I understood this correctly, that part would be "fixed" in 1.3, and that combined with the possibility to assign users to more groups is really all thats needed for me, since then my members can access several hidden forums.
If I with the current system have to make several moderator groups, and special groups for every user belonging to several forums it will be unmanageable (At least with several groups and several hidden forums). My forums are for teams that have their own forums, ofc they dont want players and captains from other teams looking into their forums. A toggle box-for checking or unchecking all the checkboxes for a group wouldnt be to bad either, perhaps even one for removing all the checks....
Sat around for a while yesterday looking at an install of these forums and I really got my hopes up, and then I started playing around with the user-system and well that doesnt work for me, but I got to say, looks like an awesome forum-package you have created.
Are you referring to my comments? If so then what was wrong with them?
Anyway, to make it clear
In 1.3 you will be able to make any usergroup a group of moderators
you will not be able to make 1 user join multiple groups (unless something changes)
The reason you will not be able to make 1 user join multiple groups is that this is a rather big feature to implement and will not benefit the majority of forums, therefore it is a bloat and is not what PunBB wants.
Hi there Connorhd, and thanks for the reply.
I was in a hurry when I wrote my last post, it was not you or a moderator that I was referring to, it turns out it was just a regular user, and I'm sorry for that. I simply started a new post since what I wanted answered was really a bit more than the topic of this thread and I was to tired to delete my first one, didnt even think about it.
Ok, the biggest issue was the moderation-groups for me anyway, now, another question, will 1.3 allow moderators in a group to add members to its group or will it still only be done by an admin? I might have missunderstood the group-moderation in 1.3 tho, I understood it like you can assign certain members of a group to be moderators of that group, however, if I understand your last post correctly you can make more moderator groups instead (I havent tried to duplicate a moderator group in punbb so I dont know if that group will get moderation priveliges, thats why I'm asking this and it might seem a bit thick of me)?
Again, thanks for the prompt replies this far, the group issue is really the only thing I dont like about punbb, and its just to bad for me :) that that seems to be the only reason why I cant change to punbb since there are lots of things I really dont like about phpbb. Theres a saying "you cant have anything" and well thats just to bad :) Punbb still has some great features and I cant do anything else than wish you guys good luck in developing it further.
The only difference is that you will be allowed to make a whole group moderators, you don't have moderators of groups or anything like that, PunBB is trying to have the simplest permissions system possible.
Thanks for the comments everyone. It sounds like I'm going to have to switch to another forum program since it is necessary that at some point members of my forum be able to join multiple groups. I was hoping someone had created a mod to do this because I really like everything else about PunBB, especially the simplicity and the fact that even someone without programming knowledge can figure out how to set it up, make changes in the layout, etc.
Yeah, thanks, got my answers and it seems like I have to stick with phpbb for the time beeing.
Either that or you could write your own mod or request the mod that would enable such a thing.
Yeah I was thinking about it since I know php/sql, but I wont ask others to do what I myself could try and do, and since I simply dont have the time to sit down in my spare time (maybe next year perhaps) and code I wont be trying it myself for a while. I am no expert tho meaning I would need some time to figure out how the system works in the first place. Im kinda itching to try starting on this since I really did like what I saw of punbb, guess I have to wish for 40hr days for x-mas .
Oh.... just installed to do a forum for small communauty... The idea is quite simple : Ihave several hidden forum for independant sports project. My idea was to create a user group for each forum and to be able to put user in the different group... But my idea was clearly that some user could belong to more than 1 group... but not all group...
So there is no possibility to do that? workaround??
Thanks
Pascal
I'd also like to strongly encourage that 1.3 will be able to do this. (if it's done via the new extensuion system, fine. But the functionality counts.)
Rickard, I absolutely agree with the idea of "lean and mean", but I think a solution is possible that won't involve a *complex* system.
As described above (and that's also my problem) imagine following use case:
- You have a community of, say 20, people.
- These people are organized in, say 5, teams or groups (or working parties).
- Everybody can be a member of 0-5 teams.
As I see it, at the moment you have to make a "personal" group for every possible combination, so that
- user A can access the forum 1 and 2
- user B can access the forum 2 and 3
...
With *no* complex inheritance model of user groups, I think most people could live fine if you define:
- group "alpha" can see and post in forum 1
- group "beta" can see and post in forum 2
- group "gamma" can see and post in forum 3
...
and
- A is member of "Users", he has additional groups "alpha" and "beta"
- B is member of "Users", he has additional groups "beta" and "gamma"
I don't see any complex stuff here and would greatly improve the feature list, as I can (atm) see no real *important* other reason to include multiple groups per user. I think the above posters will agree that is the important part.
*hoping to create a little bit thinking about this rule*
Some of these features might still get implemented, just not in the near future.
flotsam: I am quite aware of the different scenarios where multigroup membership would be an advantage. I'm just not sure this is a feature for PunBB. If you really need that kind of setup, maybe you should go with a more fully-featured bulletin board.
If you say so, it seems that I should do that.
But unfortunately I don't want to and will more likely continue with this workaround with a group "A+B" and "B+C" although it's a admin nightmare.
But on the other hand I won't ever install phpBB again and haven't yet found a forum suited that's not so fully-featurd and all eye-candy. And punBB seems much more secure, so you won't drive me away
I just tried to communicate that imho this is not a full-blown (needless) feature, but more like an absolute requirement.
Keep up the good work and please don't be beset.
For what it's worth, I too absolutely NEED this functionality. I really wish you'd reconsider adding it, Rickard.
I actually wrote a mod for multiple groups (and considering I wrote it in < 1 day while I was half asleep, it worked surprisingly well). I don't think I have the code still, but all it took was an extra table (user_groups) that had 3 columns: user_id, group_id, and primary. Your "primary" group was the one used for non-forum permissions stuff and all the groups were used to determine forum permissions
It did require a rewrite of most permission checking functionality
I'm sure the actual implementation isn't all that difficult. I can imagine the testing will be nightmare though. There's nothing more tedious than testing permissions. User A is part of group AA that has permissions to forum CCC and user A is a member of group BB that has permissions to forum DDD, but are disallowed read access to forum CCC etc etc etc. To top things off, it's something you have to test extremely well to avoid any security problems. The admin interface also has to be adapted. Should it be possible to assign new members to multiple groups when they register? Do we need to update the install script? Additions to the upgrade script? Documentation? I'm not whining here. I'm just saying there is always at a lot more work involved than you think.
Speaking of phpBB. Does it have multiple group membership?
It does
User A is part of group AA that has permissions to forum CCC and user A is a member of group BB that has permissions to forum DDD, but are disallowed read access to forum CCC
Well, "Deny wins" or "Allow wins" comes to my mind.
Deny: A can't access CCC, because one or more checks fail ( AND )
Allow: A can access CCC, because one check succeds ( OR )
I'd suggest "Allow wins" because afaik phpBB uses this approach and the handling of multiple groups is one thing there that really works 
If the policy will be mainly "the admin is responsible to create the groups in such a manner that it works and not everybody has any permissions" - what seems most feasible anyways, I don't think so many checks are involved.
Of coure it would be very good to have some javascript-"all, none, inverse"-buttons in the forum permissions setting, when you have 10 groups it's clicking, clicking, clicking atm.
Should it be possible to assign new members to multiple groups when they register?
I'd say no, that would be really overkill. Shouldn't be too much work to sort the people out. If it's a really big forum, you most likely will have many, many normal users and just some special ones who need multiple groups (as I see it in one forum I'm mod, we have 1200 registered and ~20 in some multiple groups, including Admins, Moderators, Development, and so on. But would be quite hard without multiple groups per user.
flotsam: I am quite aware of the different scenarios where multigroup membership would be an advantage. I'm just not sure this is a feature for PunBB. If you really need that kind of setup, maybe you should go with a more fully-featured bulletin board.
Perhaps you're forgetting one major thing here: Without people getting what they need from your forum, eventually, you'll be the only one happy enough with it to use the thing. I've had to hack the Christ out of it just to get something that's remotely close to what I need. To be blatantly honest, the only thing that's stopping me from getting vBulletin is the price tag. I'd much rather contend with bloat and useless features than a complete lack of things that many people seem to need.
Errm, why are you using PunBB then? PunBB is most certainly not meant to be a free alternative to vB.
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