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).
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.
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
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:
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.
I would also love to see this. We also have a similar situation.
Having negative category membership would work. But I think a more powerful and flexible solution would be to have user-defined automatic groups (like staff is today). These groups could support basic set operations to determine membership.
For example with this feature staff doesn’t need to be a special case but can just be admin + moderators. The fact that this auto-group was created is really a strong hint that this feature is useful and should be extended to a general feature rather than a built-in.
With this you could implement the negative exclusion by having a group HasAccess = AccessGroup - BannedGroup.
These automatic groups would also be very useful for other use cases as well. For example:
Right now we have a few locked forums that basically encompass smaller circles of people. Something like:
Needing to apply the right list of groups to every category is tedious and error prone. We had many cases where one group was missing from a category that they should have had access to. Being able to define groups like this would make this much easier to manage:
staff auto-group)It is also common for us to have multiple categories that have the exact same set of access rules. This is basically a simpler case than above, but it would be nice to be able to just create one auto-group and use it multiple times rather than needing to repeat the whole group list and keep it in sync across many categories.
Have you taken a look at the dynamic groups plugin?