XF Permissions System Sucks

Which was most likely controlled by the post image I attached above



The point of using a banned group as primary would be so that there is NEVER any possibility of the ban being lifted by the system since all settings are set to NEVER, which cannot be over-ridden by any secondary groupings that they may be a member of.

 

Yes, but it's immediately observable by having it in the primary account and if it's the singular account group setting you don't have to worry about styling priority.

 

styling priority has no effect on permissions though, are you referring to other effects guided by styling?

 

If you had a user that had a Primary as Registered and secondaries as
Banned
Limited
Whatever1
Whatever2

you then have to maintain appropriate styling priority for each one. By simply setting their Primary as Banned (a user group manually created) you don't have to worry if the styling priority is such that the BANNED group has the correct placement in the chain to be applied. Further those secondary groups may also have permissions that may override the "banned" group unless you have set NEVER across the board. The BANNED status is the primary way to ban, but usergroup is used for styling for a BANNED member specific to that group.
This would allow you to assign a specific style to them (if I remember correctly as I don't run XF any more) and other style related activity that is specific to that group (say certain template modifications).

 

Why not just put Banned styling priority as the highest? Then if everything is set to "never", your perms and styling priority issues are all covered....right?

 

You can... but then again you have to make sure that it's always the highest. KISS principle applies. One group to rule them all!
Also by making the group the only user group they are a member of they are assured of only being "unbanned" by a definitive manual intervention.... or pretty sure as I don't think the promotions allows the changing of the primary group, only secondary. I've closed the demo account out over at XF and don't have an install active so not really sure.

 

You know, I actually even gave an example where this was outright done.

Go look at SMF 2.0. They have this. It routinely confuses people.

 

I agree with this. Cloning or being able to export/import permissions would be massively helpful.

I've set up a spreadsheet with each usergroup permission listed in columns. Made the move from Xenforo to vBulletin last week. Once the data had migrated I sat with my spreadsheet printout (A3 naturally) and laboriously updated each usergroup and then each node permission. Took about 2 hours!

I've been getting my head around the permissions system on XF for a few months now. Once you realise how it's intended to work, it makes sense but it does take time to understand it.

 

I'd just like Vbulletin's permissions system on XF. I wonder if it's possible to create an addon that would essentially do this.

 

Only problem with that is that banned users don't see the proper banned message or whatever it is. I know I had issues with this when we first moved now terminated KH-Flare to XenForo in January 2014. The fix was to set everything to Not Set (No) for the additional Banned user group created only for styling.

Unless you want to apply different styling to make banned users stand out.