Set default group for new registrations?

titworm · Client Joined: Aug 31, 2005 Posts: 5

Hi all,

I'm running RN 2.10.00. Initially the portal was autoassigning new registrations to the moderator group, I believe because it was the only group at the time and had the lowest id number.

I've since blown away all of the groups and created 3 new ones for differing levels of access. I thought if I created the least access group first that users would go into that one, but since I made the change they're not getting assigned to any group.

What I'd like to know is which behavior is normal? A default group or no group at all? If the former how do I flag a group to assimilate all new users?

fkelly · Posted: Sat May 05, 2007 6:55 am

I could be wrong and I haven't gone in and tested or looked at the code, but I don't believe that a new user should be getting assigned to any group by "default". What are you doing to use groups to control access? How are you setting that up? I know that you can assign blocks and modules to only be accessible to a given group ... is that what you're doing? But even there you'd need to go into groups administration and put the users "manually" into the group (and the process for doing this is a p.i.t.a.) unless I am mistaken.

I think there may be a "bug" which coincidentally resulted in your new registrations being stuffed into moderators group # but this is not something that can be relied on.

montego · Posted: Sat May 05, 2007 10:00 am

titworm, I am concerned that without that original Moderator group, that something may not work properly in the Forums. I am not 100% on that either as the phpBB is not my strong suit.

We might want to see if Evaders99 or Susann have any input on that.

Are you trying to auto-place a new user into a NSN Group (i.e., what you see under "Edit Groups" within the ACP) or are you wanting this strictly for Forum permission purposes? Or, is it both?

titworm · Client Joined: Aug 31, 2005 Posts: 5

montego wrote:

titworm, I am concerned that without that original Moderator group, that something may not work properly in the Forums. I am not 100% on that either as the phpBB is not my strong suit.

We might want to see if Evaders99 or Susann have any input on that.

Are you trying to auto-place a new user into a NSN Group (i.e., what you see under "Edit Groups" within the ACP) or are you wanting this strictly for Forum permission purposes? Or, is it both?

Forums and permission levels thereof seem to be working fine.

I was assuming I broke the auto-add feature because I'd seen the portal behave that way in the beginning and it stopped as soon as I wiped all the groups and remade them.

What I'm doing is taking advantage of the syncing between phpbb_groups and nsngroups to setup 3 levels of access to foums, modules and blocks. Forums access is done by setting all groups that aren't open to anonymous to "private[hidden]" and then modifying the group permissions to "allowed access" or "disallowed access" and "is moderator" or "not moderator" on each forum.

As I said, pretty much everything is working like I want it to, I was just concerned that I'd broken a default group feature for nuke_users. And if it is not normal behavior to assign new user to a default group then I can get rid of my minimal access group because I can accomlish the same thing by having them in no group.

I appreciate the help.

evaders99 · Moderator Joined: Apr 30, 2004 Posts: 2852

There isn't an autoadd feature. But phpBB does create an internal group within nuke_bbgroups table for every user. Why: because it uses that to simplify its own permissions systems. All groups (whether single or multiuser) can be assigned permissions.

If NSN Groups is somehow relying on the nuke_bbgroups table and interacting with the single user groups, that may be something to look into.

fkelly · Posted: Sun May 06, 2007 6:29 pm

Evaders, I looked into this a bit. I know that when nsngroups creates a group it also creates a separate PHPbb group in the separate PHPbb group table. From there the relationships are more murky. I don't think nsngroups "relies" on the PHPbb tables. And I think you can create a PHPbb group without creating a nsngroup table. I'm not sure about deletions and changes.

I have this "fuzzy" project in mind for improving and extending nsngroups functionality and to do so we would also want to better define the relationships between nsngroups and PHPbb groups. Probably the two should just operate separately because otherwise we would be dependent on something that's beyond our control, namely what core PHPbb does with groups.

titworm · Client Joined: Aug 31, 2005 Posts: 5

Thanks for all of your replies. Where I'm stuck now is that I'd like to create an admin account with access only to the groups module, but it seems that only super admins can modify the groups.

I tried making another user the moderator for a group and he was able to add folks using the "usergroups" link ontop the forums, but that did not update the nsn group.

I'm really hesitant about giving super admin to folks who aren't familiar with the cms, but it sure would be handy to have another to help with assigning groups to new registrations.

And I agree. The nsngroups route for modules & block permissions is a royal pain, but since I don't see a way to stop random folks from registering accounts this is the best way to protect modules I don't want strangers looking at.

montego · Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 7:51 am

Quote:

And I agree. The nsngroups route for modules & block permissions is a royal pain, but since I don't see a way to stop random folks from registering accounts this is the best way to protect modules I don't want strangers looking at.

Unfortunately, that is how the feature was implemented. This is not a separate module per se, therefore, its administration is in the SuperUser category.

However, one way to stop "random folks from registering accounts" is to use the Approved Membership Lite hack from my site. This gives you the ability to monitor and approve sign-ups. However, it is just a simply "hack" and is not intended to be a full-fledged user management system. You will still need to assign users to groups if you wish to separate out various content.