Best way to limit attachments for new users?

[Club3G]

I have attachments on (hence my slew of attachment related posts tonight, heh) and the users on my forum are pretty happy about it. Got the bugs worked out, looks good.

One thing I'm very concerned with is brand new accounts being able to attach images. It's not that I care about space, its that someone could sign up, hop into any old forum and attach a bunch of pornography to my server and violate my hosting agreement.

As you can imagine, that'd be bad. I made an announcement that I would immediately ban anyone posting porn, but if it's someone simply out to be malicious, well, you get the idea.

Is there an easy/recommended way to make it so that either users need to be registered for a month or (better yet) have at least 100 posts to attach things?

Love to hear some opinions on this. Thanks very much.

[Jake Bunce]

You can use promotions to do this.

First turn off attachment posting privs for the starting usergroup (most likely the Registered group) in your:

Admin CP -> Usergroups -> Usergroup Manager -> Edit Usergroup -> Can Upload Attachments

Set this to No.

Also make sure this group has the Allow Users to have Member Groups setting enabled:

Then create a new group that has attachment posting privs:

Admin CP -> Usergroups -> Add New Usergroup

Set all of the new group's permissions to No except for the Can Upload Attachments permission. The excess No permissions will have no effect on overall permissions because this group is going to be used as a secondary group.

Then create a promotion in your:

Admin CP -> Usergroups -> Promotions -> Add New Promotion

Usergroup = the original group that has no attachment posting privs
Reputation Comparison Type = Greater or Equal to
Posts = 100
Promotion Strategy = Posts
Promotion Type = Additional Usergroups
Move User to Usergroup = the new group you just setup

Now members of the original group will be granted attachment posting privs when they reach the specified post count. Also note that because you are using a secondary group, the permissions are independant of the primary groups making it easy to manage permissions.

[Club3G]

If I move them from registered users to the new group (I named it "attachment promotion") wouldn't attachment promotion become their primary group, and default all of the permissions to No, or am I misunderstanding the usergroup system?

[Jake Bunce]

In my instructions the new group is used as a secondary group. The primary group will stay the same. Your users will be added to the new group via a secondary group membership so they will belong to multiple groups.

The new usergroup system is pretty slick, but it can be a little daunting if you aren't used to it. Basically what you get when some one belongs to multiple groups is an overlapping of permissions. One Yes for any permission will result in that permission being set to an overall Yes for that user. In the case of your users, their primary group will say No while their secondary group will say Yes. The end result is a Yes.

[Club3G]

Awright, I sort of get it. I might be simply getting confused by the syntax, I assumed that primary permissions overwrote secondary, not that any yes always = yes and that the groups are equal, etc.

Thank you very much as always Jake.

[Club3G]

Awright one last question, it looks like it's a scheduled task to run the job, which fires every hour by default.

Is there a way I can run this now to process the promotions?

[Club3G]

Or I could just click the button and see the giant "run now" button next to the task titled "promotions"...

Sorry bro, it's 11PM here, lol, I really need to sleep more and edit my forum less at night

[Jake Bunce]

Is there a way I can run this now to process the promotions?

Admin CP -> Scheduled Tasks -> Scheduled Task Manager

Click the Run Now button for the User Promotions task.

[Jake Bunce]

Or I could just click the button and see the giant "run now" button next to the task titled "promotions"...

Sorry bro, it's 11PM here, lol, I really need to sleep more and edit my forum less at night

heh