Category permissions and the new permission groups

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

From your response in the other topic

@martin

so these (this and Category permissions and the new permission groups - #6 ) are more unintended side effects. I don’t intend to remove everyone yet as an option from category permissions…but over time I think it’s probably a good idea to do a fast follow up on this.

The problem is that I was thinking it would be even less clear what I should migrate everyone category permissions to, but maybe it can follow logic like you are suggesting? E.g. if I remove everyone, a migration would add these category permissions for a site:

1. Site requires login → everyone becomes logged_in_users
2. Site is public/doesn’t require login → everyone becomes logged_in_users AND anonymous_users, two separate category permissions

The more I think about this the more I worry about this.

What happens if I only add anonymous_users to a category and don’t add logged_in_users ?
What happens if I add anonymous_users while my forum is login_required ?

Also, the current technical implementation is that when category permissions are set to everyone, there is simply no entry in category_groups and read_restricted is set to false.

That is very simple and straightforward: if there are no permissions set then the permissions are determined by the global forum permissions (the login_required setting) and no further restrictions apply.

So making this change would be adding a huge amount of complexity and weird combinations would be possible (you could do anonymous users and staff )

My suggestion would be:

• remove anonymous_users as an option for category permissions altogether
• keep everyone and logged_in_users
• remove trust_level_0 as an option since it equals logged_in_users

or alternatively, but maybe less clear for less experienced admins

• remove anonymous_users and logged_in_users as an option for category permissions
• keep everyone (and TL0)

In all cases, keep everyone. And you won’t need a migration either