How do usernotes work? What is the best setup?

[dwh]

Can you explain this feature? Is the idea for staff only to make comments about a user? Or for anyone to comment on them and only staff be able to read them? Is it connected to the karma thing? I read the documentation, searched around, but couldn't find a good explanation. I want to set it up right in the usergroup permissions and use this effectively, but I don't get it yet.

[daemon]

There is no one "right" setup. It depends on what you want to do with the user notes feature. On my forum we make it so that only staff members can view and post user notes. This way we don't have to create threads about individual users in the private forums, we just attach the notes to the profiles. We have it set so that users cannot see their notes or other notes. You can set the permissions for user notes on a per-usergroup basis. We have it set so that only Global Moderators, Administrators, and Diary Administrators can see and post user notes. All other usergroups have all the user notes permissions set to No except User Notes Can Be Posted About This Group. This way we only the staff can view notes.

You can customize it to pretty much any needs, it just depends on the method you want. Also it's not tied into the "karma"/reputation system.

[dwh]

That sounds like a logical setup. I will try to emulate that. One question though, if the users can post but not see a usernote, which template is it where thay can post a usernote?"

[daemon]

If I remember correctly it's the usernote_note template.

[dwh]

I just tried a test. I allowed all members to post usernotes about others, but only admins can read usernotes. It still wouldn't allow you to post a usernote unless you were an admin. Did I set it up wrong or is there a bug?

[daemon]

I'd actually consider this a bug. Apparently you can only post notes if you can view notes, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, especially because it doesn't specify that the permission is dependent.

[dwh]

What about reputation?

I posted it in the bug tracker. This was very helpful.

Now I have a question about reputation. What are popular ways to implement it? Allow people to read user ratings? Although I'm tempted to, doesn't this just invite flame wars? Is it better (and is it possible) to let users vote positive or negative without comments being visible to anyone but admins? Or to allow positive comments to be viewed and to hide negative ones? Does anyone want to post a url for an example of a good way to set it up?

[daemon]

On my site I just allow reputation enabled (including negative) for everybody but only administrators can see who left the reputation. You can set it on a per-usergroup level who can see who left reputation, but there's no such setting for comments. The only people who can read reputation comments are those who the reputation points are for (and moderators/administrators with the proper permissions via the Admin CP). You could have it hide comments by editing the templates and wrapping a conditional around the comment data for certain usergroups; the same could be done for entire rows of data (negative reputation rows only). I can help you do any of that if you need me to .

[dwh]

Interesting set up. So even if you disable them seeing who left the comment, they can still see what was said? Too bad that isn't part of the permission too.

[daemon]

Interesting set up. So even if you disable them seeing who left the comment, they can still see what was said? Too bad that isn't part of the permission too.

Yes, that is correct; you can prevent people from seeing who left the comment but not the actual comment.