establishing roles after importing from phpbb

meraine · February 2013

I apologise in advance if this post is hard to understand, I have pretty rudimentary computer skills, but I do own an online community that recently imported a forum from Phpbb into Vanilla because I found the former too complicated. I managed the export with help, but then found that instead of getting the list of default roles that is shown in the Vanilla documentation, I got only some (most significantly, Applicant was missing), as well as some imported from Phpbb that I didn't want (like bots, for example). The problem is, this community is private, and no matter what I do I can't seem to set up the roles so that only registered users can see content. I want a category where applicants are just that, people waiting for approval to use the forum.

I know you can add roles, so I've done that, but I'd like someone to tell me exactly how to configure it so that no-one except registered users can see the forum's content, and applicants cannot -- I've had a couple of more computer-savvy people than me try, but so far it's not working and we don't know why.

Thanks, Melissa

timverry · February 2013

There is an option when setting roles' permissions. For the applicant role...

Go to your Dashboard. Under "Users" click on "Roles & Permissions."

Now, next to the Applicant role, click the edit button. Now scroll down to the "Default Category Permissions" and make sure that the "View" checkbox for the Discussions column is not checked.

That should make it so that visitors that come to your forum will not be able to see any of the content, but they can still apply/register.

PS You also need to make it so that "Applicant" is the default role for non-signed in users. In my case, I just used the Vanilla-provided "Guests" role as the default for non-signed in users, so you may need to make sure that the guest role's permissions do not conflict with your custom Applicant role.

meraine · February 2013

Hi, thanks for replying! I got as far as "next to the Applicant role", and hit the first problem; I've never had "Applicant" show up as a role. I think it's because I imported the forum from Phpbb; as I said above, I got a bunch of users that are not on the Vanilla list of default users (bots, coppas I think, that came from phpbb, both of which I deleted), and didn't get access to the ones that the Vanilla documentation lists. I also, probably stupidly, deleted "guest" as I didn't want people who were not completely registered to be able to see anything, and it seemed to me that "guest" was designed to let people do the one thing I didn't want.

So how do I get "Applicant" back, or if I recreate it by selecting new role, could someone tell me exactly which boxes to check/uncheck?.

Thanks for your patience ...