Private Messages and Groups

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 8:53 am

Situation:

Non-profit senior care society with a need to restrict features by group.

Group "Paid Members" haves access to Private Messages. No problem, except when they write a message to Registered Members NOT in the Paid Group. No surprise here, just more of that difficult phpbb2nuke thing.

Would it be too difficult to implement an RN check for group compliance before $groupuser sends a PM?

Only allow sending PMs within Paid Group.

Or, if recipient not in Paid Group, send polite messages to 2 users.
Sorry, $user is not on the PM white list. and
Sorry, $groupuser, our member attempted to send you a message, but you can not access PMs, do consider joining (link)!

Or, perhaps I've missed something on the forums side, where I could turn off PMs for registered and and turn them on for Paid Group.

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

<bump>

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 9:45 am

So, what happens to the recipient of the PM who is not a member of the group? Does he see that he has a message but can't get into PM to see the actual message? Or does he not even get notified?

Anything is possible programming - wise but your request would take a bit of work, especially the part about sending messages to the users. The check on whether the recipient is on the list would probably be the simplest part but programming it to then send messages (which is kind of a contradiction since you'd be undermining your own security, so maybe emails would be better) would take a good bit of work I think.

And I don't think you can do what you want thru the Forums groups. I did a little spelunking in another thread a while back and nsngroups and forums groups are different beasts with a very flaky and undocumented interface between them. The whole group facilities should really be re-written to be easier to manage ... like have a pick list of users to add to groups and be able to search for users based on name, email, username and the like but again it's a matter of having the time and expertise to do the coding as well as, of course, getting agreement ahead of time on the scope and nature of the project.

Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2007 11:35 am

Even if not perfect, Groups rocks the RavenNuke. I hope that over time we can make it even better.

You're right, with the current config, the recipient who is not in the Paid Member group still gets an email saying they have a new PM. ... and then they can't get to it.

My work-around will likely be to convince the board that for now allowing all registered users access to PMs isn't a big deal. My guess is that restricting registered users to paid members is not far off in the future ... so that would take care of the problem too.

Thanks for the bump and thanks for the words.