Extremely minor profile issue regarding permission groups

[MarkFL]

Hello,

When I view my profile, under Permission Groups, I see:



Yet when I click the Join Groups link, I see:



I just wanted to point this out, and if this is an easy thing to correct, then we should fix it, otherwise it is so minor that anything taking more than a couple of minutes wouldn't be worth it I don't think.

Best Regards,

Mark.

 

[Jameson]

I still don't know what "permission groups" are for sure but I think it's a public group that you join to voluntarily gain some new permissions to see or do something that you can't by default. Will look into it more tomorrow but I think it only applies to public groups, which we don't have at all here. On some forums there are different groups you can move between and they might see each have a special subforum only their group can see, or something like that. That is why I think this is called a "permission group".

If we don't need this at all, as I suspect, it might be best to just take that cell away from the column in everyone's profile.

 

[MarkFL]

Hey Jameson,

I truly appreciate you looking into this, especially considering how trivial it really is. Thank you as always for your dedication and attention to making this such a great site.

 

[Ackbach]

The screen you see when you click Join Groups are the User Groups to which you belong here at MHB. MHB Math Helpers, MHB Ambassadors, and each staff rank are all implemented as usergroups on vBulletin. Moreover, you can choose which of the usergroups to which you belong is your "display group". That would govern, among other things, what color your username shows up in. If you chose MHB Ambassador as your display group, your username would appear in red.

If anything, I would say this screen is misleading, because it introduces another term, "Permission groups", when it really ought to be referring to "Usergroups".

 

[Jameson]

I've been trying to find out some more details and see "Permission groups" in use since this thread was created, and although I haven't found a site that uses it in a way I find worthwhile, I do think I understand the idea now. As Ackbach wrote, on MHB this really only applies to staff members because they are the only ones who actually belong to more than one usergroup, and essentially it allows them to choose their display group - not really that useful or worth having if you ask me. However it can be set up such that all members have a handful of choices between usergroups, each of which having lots of custom permissions such as display color/style, access to hidden forums just for a certain usergroup, moderation abilities in certain forums, etc. On MHB we don't use this and won't need to in the future so I am looking into removing it from our profiles to limit confusion.

After so many years of using vB it's really neat to find something new to explore so I thank MarkFL for bringing this to our attention!