Admins, Super Mods, and Mods

[bjf123]

I'm looking at setting up a forum community for a group of clubs. I've played around with the demo and have a few questions. The community will start out with just a few clubs, and hopefully grow after that. I'm mostly curious about the supervising of the forums. Obviously, as the site admin, I'll have full control over everything. I'll need help with some things, like adding new forums, if I'm not around. Is that something that only an Admin can do? What's the difference between a Moderator and a Super Moderator? I'll need to be able to set up Mods for each club's forum, so they can moderate their own members, but will need the ability to have others Moderate the entire site.

Also, I'm thinking I'll want all forums to be readable by everyone, subject to the desires of the individual clubs' desires. However, I'll want to restrict the ability to post to the specific club members, which I'm assuming is done with user groups. Is it easy to add people to specific groups? Can that be done as part of the registration process? I'm currently using phpbb for one small club, and it's a real pain to add users to the members and officers groups.

[Zachery]

1. Administrators can have full access or very striped down limited access, But yes, only someone with Adminstrator access can add new forums.

Moderators(people in the moderator usergroup) have no access or are not moderators untill they are assigned to the forums, you can of course assing moderators to any level and they will filter down to all lower forums.

Super Moderators, are administrators who do not have access to the admincp, which they can do everything an moderator can do but they do not need to be assigned.


Having the forums readable but not able to post is part of the built in permission systems

[bjf123]

So I could set up others as Admins, so they could add new forums, but restrict them in other areas? I'm not sure what those restrictions might be, but that's doable? If I make someone a Super Mod, they'll have full Moderator rights across all forums with no other tweaking needed?

What about adding users to different user groups? Can that be done at the time of registration, or is it a manual, one by one process?

[Zachery]

Hmm, You can have administrator that only have control over adding / removing / editing forums and nothing else (outside of the default moderator permissions in the admincp ).

Well, it does not need to be manual, will these users be allowed to select whatever group they want, can they join more than one group?

But if it comes down to it it might require hacking, which the people at vBulletin.org would be more able to help

[bjf123]

I'm thinking some clubs might want to restrict who can post in their forum to their members. If it happens to be a club with a couple of hundred members, I'd prefer to not have to manually search through all users from all clubs to find the ones I need to grant posting permissions to. Am I making sense?

[Steve Machol]

To do this, set up a publicly joinable group with a Group Leader, and have a forum with access limited to that group. Then the leader can approve any requests for membership to this group and access to the forum.

[bjf123]

To do this, set up a publicly joinable group with a Group Leader, and have a forum with access limited to that group. Then the leader can approve any requests for membership to this group and access to the forum.

I think that sounds like what I'm after. I want to be able to offer each club the option of allowing anyone to join, or for them to restrict it to only their own members. At the same time, I'll want anyone who registers to be able to access the non club specific areas of the community, if that makes sense. So just to make sure I've got the concept, let's say I've got a community with two sections, one public, and one for club members only. When someone registers, they immediately have access to the public forum. They would, however, have to request to join the members only forum, which would be approved by the Group Leader of that club. Do I have this correct? If so, how do I set up the request to join the members only section? I've been playing around with the demo, and don't remember seeing that. Then again, there are so many options, it's quite likely I missed it.

That brings up one other thing I'm curious about. I know when I registered to post here, I had to agree to the forum's terms and conditions. Can that be set up for any community? If so, where is that option? I looked for it in the Admin demo panel and didn't see it anywhere.

[Steve Machol]

Yes, that's the way it works and I actually have two such forums setup on my Board just like this.

There is no function to create a specific agreement form for a T&C for a specific forum however. This requires modifying the code. You can try asking for help with this over at vbulletin.org.

[bjf123]

Thanks! I think I'll be purchasing a license soon.