XF 1.4 Managing Users via usergroups or manually adding access to forums

[leslie dow]

I run a site that teaches online classes in forums. We run around 300 classes a year and members pay to take a class--which gives them access to a forum "classroom".

I am trying to decide the best way to give them permissions to the classroom forums. The easiest way to do this manually appears to be to create a usergroup for each classroom and then add the members who have paid for that class to the usergroup. Its fast, simple and my staff loves this. The issue is that after a year I will have ~300..and so on..we do not re-use classrooms. I am not sure that is the best way to deal with this and what the impact would be on the system.

Ultimately, I want to have a developer write an addon that takes a list of registered users and gives them access to the forum "classroom" but in the interim while we try to figure out the best way for our processes to work manually in the new forums, I figured I'd ask if there was a better way to do this? Or should I just create all those usergroups?

Thanks
Leslie

 

[Paul B]

You could create a recurring user upgrade, disable it and then manually upgrade the members, choosing the expiry date.

 

[leslie dow]

Apologies, I did not make that clear. Once they buy access to a forum, they never lose it. So and expiring group would not work.

I think the only two options I have is to manually add each user to the forum giving them content access only for that forum/classroom, which means clicking all the access boxes for each user or creating a usergroup for each forum/classroom.

That is OK as long as there is no system impact from all those usergroups. If there is then I will bump up the priority of finding someone to write some code that automatically adds users to a forum without creating a usergroup.

Thanks
Leslie

 

[Paul B]

If the user group only applies for that classroom and is then no longer used after the classroom is closed, you can simply delete the user group.

All of the members will default to the Registered user group.

Unless you are using something like aMember, in which case that probably won't apply due to how aMember works.

 

[leslie dow]

We dont ever remove access to a classroom. Once they take a class they have access to that forum for as long as the site is active. Ive not looked into aMember but I will now.
Thanks
Leslie

 

[Paul B]

I wouldn't advise using aMember - I only mentioned it in case you were using it.

We dont ever remove access to a classroom. Once they take a class they have access to that forum for as long as the site is active.

In which case your options are limited - you will require a user group for each class or you will have to manually grant access via custom node/user permissions.

 

[leslie dow]

Thanks, Brogan. That is exactly what I thought. Other than a proliferation of usergroups, is there any system impact to this?

 

[leslie dow]

And yes, aMember is not what I need.

 

[Paul B]

Yes, there will be some impact in having hundreds of user groups which will translate into thousands of permission combinations.