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#260768 01/06/2018 5:42 PM
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Hi experts,

I am the admin of a board (although from my ignorance, you would never know). When I go to add what admins, global mods, users, etc. have the permissions to do by entering a 1 or a 0, I do this for each forum separately. We have about eight forums so this takes a bit of time.

Now, I do see where there is a template that permissions could be taken from, therefore doing them all quickly. Or I could change permissions in the Problems forum, save, and then use it to sync those permissions to other forums one by one.

The problem is see with that is the following:

Say that forum's permission is pretty much identical to all the others, say mods can delete posts. If I add new permissions to the Problem forum and then use it to change the other forums' permissions, if they didn't allow mods to delete posts for whatever reason, they would now inherit those permissions. Correct? It seems that once most forums have different permissions for certain reasons, when one changes permissions to a particular forum, it would be difficult to use it as a template for others.

Maybe your board is set up differently, although we do use the same versions.

Thanks. Sorry if I did not explain this correctly.

Bert


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Bert #260771 01/06/2018 10:18 PM
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The permission TEMPLATE is for you to define a basic set of permissions that can be copied to new/other forums.

If you're copying the permissions FROM one forum TO another it will take ALL permissions from the source, it won't just cherry pick specific ones. So if mods are able to delete posts in forum a and not in forum b, and you copy the perms from forum a then mods in forum b will now be able to delete posts.

I'm not really understanding your concern on this post.


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Thanks. Here is my concern. Let's use numbers instead of letters. Let's make more forums such as 20. You start off with all 20 forums having the same permissions. But, over time various forums have different permissions change for mods or users. So, now, while seven of the forums may have the same permissions, the other 13 have different permissions. Not many. Maybe even one. Over time, as the admin, you are not going to remember what forum has what permissions, you are just going to know there were reasons for them.

You then decide that while in the past, all 20 forums allowed mods to delete posts and now you do not want mods to be able to delete posts. You start with each forum, and you change the delete post permission so the 1's next to the mods are now 0's.

But, you don't want to do this manually on all 20 forums (although I think you will end up doing so). What you would like to do is change it in one forum. Then, in each of the other forums, you force them to accept the permissions of the newly changed forum. This would work for the new permissions, but now all of the forums would also have permissions they did not have before. I know that with one change, going through each forum is no big deal. But, if you made five new changes, it would be easier to have each forum inherit those permissions. My guess is you just can't do it.

As usual, sorry so long and so convoluted.


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Bert #260776 01/06/2018 10:54 PM
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If your concern is what forums have what permissions, then you should simplify the permissions... All of of the public forums here have the same permissions, and all of of the private forums here have the same permissions; there have been 0 problems over the years here for us, and this is the first time I've ever seen a user report having such issues.

If you're wanting to change ONE permission for EVERY forum, you're using the wrong tool.
CP -> Permissions -> Groups

See the "Edit Permissions" section on the right.


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Bert #260779 01/06/2018 11:19 PM
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Thanks that is the answer.

You have to remember, our board has had three board admins. And, at one point, had over 10 admins until I fired all but three. So, it's hard to know what's in there. Our mods don't do much but just sit there anyway.

Thanks for the help.


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For this very reason is why I asked about 10 years ago with ver 7 that we need some type of visual global permission management tool.

It can get very convoluted and very easy to loose track of who can do what and where.

I have helped many members in the past to fix permissions that were not entered correctly for the desired effect, and it can be very time consuming to find and correct
Especially with the -1.


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Ruben/Bert, you need to upgrade out of your old 7.5 series, and in to the current 7.6 series. A lot of work has gone in to updating the descriptions and presentation of the permissions system within the past couple years (for the 7.6 series).

Bert, I see your forum is still on v7.5.8.
The reason why the permission pages have recently been seeing updates is because it can be overwhelming for people like you who have nearly a hundred individual forums with several dozen user groups to finely manage everything (these are not normal forum setups).

Ruben, those pages have been getting updated with the recent versions. Lots of layout updating, improved clarity, and documenting has been added to the 7.6 series. Work that has been seriously needed for many past versions.


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Okay.
I am looking at a v7.6.0 site right now and the permission settings look the same.
Still no clarity on tracking permissions.

Last edited by Ruben; 01/07/2018 6:32 PM.

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The data IN the page wasn't changed, the entire system was updated for clarity; the wordings/directions in various pages, overall outlook of the control panel, etc.
Attachments
changes.gif


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Originally Posted by Ruben
Still no clarity on tracking permissions.
The description at the top says,
Allow: 1
Disable: 0
Deny: -1

You're complaining about the presentation of the page.

Rather than criticize how the a settings page looks convoluted to you, could you please draw an image/chart of what you think all the granular settings pages should look like, and attach it to your post here.

Maybe you have a better idea of how a single page, using only the bare minimum, with zero customizations, of 185 settings (37 items for a minimum of 5 user groups) can be displayed on a single page.

I'd really like to see your ideas. Please post the ideas you have for this page, as they could be extremely helpful to everyone.

Thanks!


edit:
Note that the permissions screens controls the permissions for each and all of your topic forums. Another controls the permissions for each and all of your user groups. The permissions system has been made is simple as it can possibly be made. The more forums and user groups you add, increases the complexity to your responsibility as a forum owner. Though, you only ever have to adjust permission settings during your initial forum creation, and when doing minor tweaks. These are not the type of settings which require constant changes.

There is also a permission screen for Global site features and one for granting access to each Control Panel features (for having multiple admins with different responsibilities, or allowing moderators to edit/not edit users...etc). The permissions system is extremely granular, allowing any forum owner to taylor their forum install very specifically to their needs. By dumbing it down any further, you'd also be removing features from the package.

Unless otherwise specified, the current settings are:
1 = Enable (Allow)
0 = Disable

And... Less common, and is used only in rare situations where normal account level hierarchy needs specific tuning:
-1 = Deny (Never Allow)


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I am not sure if you are just talking about boards with 100 forums and sort of lumping me in there. We have 16 forums. Yes, they are not set up correctly. But, as I refer to this site when I talk to people on our board at times, it is a forum on forums. A forum which is here to help people who host boards and have been doing it for years and that is what they do either for a living or whatever is going to be better than a forum created by a doctor and then administrated by various admins. Especially when the host admin used to be a controlling ass....who did everything he could to screw things up and then blame me. He is gone now. When I became the board super admin, the first thing I did was notice the link at the bottom to this forum and asked many questions. Also, to even get to 7.5.8, our company required help from some from this board.

I am not too worried about permissions. If I need to change what permissions a global mod is allowed, I will just do it manually.

I don't think Ruben was complaining about the permission pages in the control panel. I think he read that the new version had an easier permissions setup, and he didn't see that. Sorry for speaking for him. But, everyone, as usual, has been helpful. Usually the answer is simply you can't do it that way.


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I never asked to revamp the whole permissions section.
What would be nice for troubleshooting problematic permissions is a spreadsheet style page.
Where it displays all the default and custom groups across the top as columns
and all the permissions by categories(CP,Site,Forum) on the left as rows.
A nice to have would be a printer friendly option to print out the matrix.
So to identify where any conflicts are.
To me it can be done with a pivot table and or concat but the printer friendly concept is out of my league..

Then you can use it as a cheatsheet to either design the boards permissions or find the elusive -1 entries that most users misuse.

It could be just a view only page.

And yes it would be a busy page but then you could view all the permissions for all groups at a glance..

Last edited by Ruben; 01/09/2018 5:30 PM.

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If its useful to you, one undocumented new feature within UBB.threads 7.6.1 is the ability to CLEAN produce printable Control Panel pages. This is meant specifically for the purpose of outputting a page's contents to a static file, to be used for future referencing.

In prior versions of UBB.threads (7.5.x and 7.6.0), the side menu, headers/footers and backgrounds would all destroy your output -- There was no set page proportions. So your output of one page may be wider than the output of another. The Left menu would also randomly place itself entirely on the first page of your output, pushing the content on to the following pages.

With UBB.threads 7.6.1, all pages are exported at exactly the same width. The useless side/header/footer/background colors are stripped. But the section title bars, and related colored options remain. Making your output look intentional, rather than just an afterthought.

The same can be done with your permissions pages for Forums, Site, Control Panel. Just expand the sections you want to output, and print to PDF or printer.


For example, see attached comparison images.
Attachments
20180109_14-03-09.PNG 20180109_14-04-03.PNG 20180109_14-04-10.PNG


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screenshot of PDF / print output of only selected permission settings.

UBB.threads 7.6.1 vs UBB.threads 7.5.x
Attachments
20180109_14-15-28.PNG 20180109_14-15-49.PNG


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Now this would make it much easier to make some sort of administration users manual.

Bert #260848 01/09/2018 10:21 PM
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That would be pretty useful and very cool.


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