User group promotion overrides privacy settings for Who's Online only

[TimWilson]

We have a promoted user group for people who make donations (VIP), and it's been working fine for years, but a member of that group reported an issue that I've verified. If you're a member of that group and have the two privacy options deselected (Show your online status, Show your current activity), it works on their profile page and within the forum as expected, but they're always visible in Who's Online.

I verified with my test account. Turn on the VIP group membership, and that account is visible in Who's Online (while invisible elsewhere). Turn off the VIP group membership, and the account is gone from Who's Online and the other places too.

I've been looking through the Group Permissions for the VIP group, and I'm not seeing anything obvious like "Override privacy settings for Who's Online". Is there some other aspect of the user group promotion that you would expect to override the user's privacy settings?

Thanks,
Tim
forum.ukuleleunderground.com

 

[Old Nick]

Turn on the VIP group membership, and that account is visible in Who's Online (while invisible elsewhere). Turn off the VIP group membership

How do you turn on/off a usergroup?

 

[TimWilson]

How do you turn on/off a usergroup?

Sorry if I said that badly. Turn on or off a user's membership in that group. So, on their User Details page in the ACP, either check or uncheck their membership in the secondary group "VIP".

In my organizational scheme, everybody is in Registered as primary.

 

[Old Nick]

In my organizational scheme, everybody is in Registered as primary.

That's the good method.

So we only access this group by purchasing an upgrade, right? If you manually add a user to this group, does it have the same privacy concern? From what you describe it looks like a bug, maybe it comes from the automatic promotion... There are no settings that can produce this, to my knowledge.

 

[Old Nick]

I assume you know this, but "hidden" users remain visible (but grayed out) to Staff members, that has nothing to do with your problem does it?
Privacy options are user level, not user group. Don't you have any third-party add-ons enabled that could be causing this problem?

 

[AndyB]

"hidden" users remain visible (but grayed out) to Staff members,

Indeed that must be the issue. Tim you need to log out to see that an Unregistered / Unconfirmed visitor would not see the username in the Members online widget.

 

[TimWilson]

I figured it out! It's both a bug, and not worth addressing.

The bug, such as it is, is that instead of giving me the gray-styled "invisible" name of a private user, I failed to mention that the VIP group has a styled name (bold, orange), and that style overrides the gray "invisible" styling for non-VIP users.

So maybe it's not a bug, but I certainly haven't found this documented anywhere...but either way, now that I know that this is the case, I'll be fine.

Thanks for everyone's clues pointing me in the right direction to search!

 

[Paul B]

Use this in the extra.less template:

.username--invisible
{
    &:before {
        content: "[";
    }
    &:after{
        content: "]";
    }
}

It wraps user names with square brackets so you can still see which logged in members have unchecked their online status.

 

[TimWilson]

Use this in the extra.less template:

AWESOME!! Works perfectly! Thank you so much!