Granular group-based permissions for anonymous and logged in users

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

Thanks Moin, this is exactly right. @gormus the only place that the actual group IDs come through still is in the admin UI for the theme settings.

@Moin

Migrating without being sure the new groups work on all forums could break stuff too, and admins can toggle the change on and off.

Not sure if this is clear based on what I’ve posted before, but the anonymous_users and logged_in_users are usable at any time without this upcoming change being enabled, I added them independently months ago. This is the main thing the upcoming change does:

@martin

When the upcoming change is enabled, any setting with everyone as a selected group will have it automatically translated to the logged_in_users ID, so no data in the site settings table will be changed when toggling the upcoming change. When the upcoming change becomes Permanent, we will do a data migration for all group settings to make this change.

So either way, you are safe if you get rid of everyone everywhere it’s used and only use anonymous_users and logged_in_users from now on.

Today I plan to figure out a plan of the remaining work I need to do to truly get rid of everyone for site settings (leaving category settings alone at the moment), and I will post it here, so hopefully that will help stay on the same page going forward, and I can keep updating this plan as I go.