Permissions levels

Minisweeper

As a sub-topic of the increased permission settings in vanilla 0.93 I'd just like to mention the following... I was browsing down the discussions list shifting topics between categories as i sometimes do when people have stuck something in 'random' but which might be useful for people searching for an extension under the extensions category only and assuming it's not there (or whatever) when i noticed that the big man himself (tut tut) had carelessly left his '0.9.3 Scalability' topic under 'random' which i thought was probably more appropriate under 'vanilla' so i moved it in for him. But then i thought that while (presumably!) mark as a higher power in this case doesnt mind, there may be forums out there where higher moderators (admins if you will) would get annoyed with lower moderators (mods) messing with something of theirs, even though essentially it's within their power. It all really comes down to forum owners choosing their moderators properly and assigning them the correct levels, but there are cases where essentially permissions will overlap so i just wondered what you guys thought about how to deal with situations like this... i.e. in irc (closest similie i could think of), you can have 'half op' users who can voice/kick/ban people of a lower or equal power to them (standards, voiced, or half opped users) but cant touch the 'ops'. I suspect realistically this is far over-complicating things for the purposes of a nice simple forum, but i thought i'd drop it in there anyway.

Mark

I will say that in 0.9.2 the permissions are one of the big lacking features in Vanilla. They span across too much functionality. I plan on making the permissions very specific for the next rev - even allowing extension authors to add new role permissions as easily as they can add user settings. Every single button will have it's own permission - so you can make your role permissions very refined.

Minisweeper

*strokes mark in a dr evil stroking his pussy type fashion and puts little finger to corner of mouth.

ChrisGwynne

Would this work like a points system yayhooray once had by any chance?

Would there be a way to automatically increase the role after x period?

Minisweeper

I hadnt thought of that but i suppose it's an option.

Mark

You could certainly write an extension to do that. It would be quite a bit of work, though, since there is no way in the existing system of placing the roles in any kind of "order of importance". A role is just a role with various permissions - none more important than another except on a human level. So, your extension would have to place orders of importance on the roles somehow so it would know what to bump a user up to after they receive +X points.

lech

The point system (aka karma) was the stupidest thing ever concieved!