Ban members from certain categories?

[dylanh724 (dh)]

Most of our forum is pretty general. However, one part is a “forum game”. If you get caught cheating, you get banned from playing. However, we can’t actually ban them from that specific category … or can we? It’s getting hard to moderate.

EDIT: A workaround, I made a group to store the people suspended from a certain category. However, it would be great if I could natively ban people from certain categories (with the see/create/reply permission options).

[tobiaseigen]

I think the only way to do this would be to create a group that includes everyone who is allowed to be in the category.

It would be nice to have a negative category permission available on category security settings, e.g. “Cannot create/reply/see”. But that does not exist now.

[Falco]

This is 100% covered by groups, just remove the cheaters from the game group and they can’t access the category anymore.

[dylanh724 (dh)]

This is 100% covered by groups, just remove the cheaters from the game group and they can’t access the category anymore.

So default put everyone in a “game” group, then REMOVE them as they are suspended? Interesting

[Iceman]

Sorry for the Necromancy, but this is the top result while searching and other topics (linked below) are either closed or not as clear when it comes to the question.

Following the logic exposed here and in similar topics, it seems that the best way is to add “everyone” to a certain group and then remove from said group the users that you want “banned” from a category, since we don’t have an option to remove “see” permission from groups, only add.

This seems fairly logical, but let’s say that your instance has 5k users, do you have to add them all by hand? And keep updating it whenever a new user joins? I’m not certain if there is any “cheatcode” like “@everyone” when adding users to a group, doesn’t seem like it.

Is there a better way and I missed it?

Thanks.

Other related topics:

Can I make some Topics in a Category which only certain Groups can see and participate in?

Is this possible? I have searched for the answer to this and I have decided that this is ‘likely’ not possible right now but I want to be sure. Could it be done with a simple plugin (vs a complex plugin that only an expert could write)? I do not want to make a Category which only certain Groups can see and participate in. Also, a PM is not what I am looking for.

New category permission - "cannot see"/"exclude"

Continuing the discussion from Suspend as way to expire membership: After suggesting to another user that instead of suspending a user they could put them in a group and change category permissions. I recently came across my own use case for this, where I needed to add some users to my instance and only give them access to one category. It does not seem like there is an easy way to do so, without modifying the permissions for every other category, and putting all other users in their own grou…

Negative group permissions

Does anyone have any ideas, tips or tricks how to exclude members from a specific group from accessing a specific category? What would be the easiest way to accomplish that?

How to create private categories using category security settings

This video explains how you can use group permissions to create private categories (or private “forums”). Scroll down for written instructions. [How to create a group and add permissions to a category] The Security tab on the category edit page is used to control both the visibility of categories and what users can do in a category. This is done by defining an access list of groups that associate a group name with an access level. The default permission for a new category is that t…

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

RIght… There isn’t a good way to ban someone from one category. It doesn’t come up often. Usually if you want to ban someone it’s from everywhere. You could at the rails console add everyone to a group and then remove the person, but it would be painful.

You could have a plugin that added everyone to a group and then had a site setting of users that you want not to be in that group.