Using promotions to sort user into groups

[Sabermaster]

I got a question regarding the concept of sorting user into groups via promotions.

To give you a little background, I am running an inofficial forum for the crew of a regional airline in Germany.
We have a section that is universally for everyone and we have sections that are only to be viewed by either the pilots of the flight attendants.

I am achieving this by having the registered group nit being able to see forums by default and I assign the right to view on a per node basis.
EG the forum for everyone has permissions set for the registered group, the pilots forum only for the pilots.

Now the issue is (if you want to call it that, after all its normal system behavior), that new registrations default to the registered group and I have to assign them to either secondary group by hand.
I had the idea of using a custom user field which they can only edit upon registration to add them straight to to the correct secondary group (pilots or cabin crew) by using the promotion system.

Before implementing this I would like to ask if anyone has experience with using this straight from registration or if there are any known issues (besides the timing of the cronjob which may not coincide with the time of registration).

It will basically save me some work, based on the assumption the everyone will be honest, but this being a closed forum only for flight crew members of our company I do not see any issue with this.
I do not have to sort out fake registration by hand because its setup in a way that users can only register using the company email address. All other registration attempts will be rejected. (thanks to an add-on from Andy B)

 

[sbj]

The only real "issue" with user group promotions are that they don't work immediately like one would expect. The cron runs every hour on the minute of 20, so someone registered at 19:21 would have to wait 59 minutes to be put to the right usergroup.

But you can duplicate that cron in ACP and set the clock to every minute. It is still not immediate but almost.

Or you install this addon and make it immediate (there is also a XF1 version).

There should be no problems when you set your user criteria for promotions correctly. Very helpful is the "user change log" to see if promotions work correctly. So set everything up, register a test account and see for yourself (maybe do that on localhost before you go to live).

If of course you trust your members. Cause let's say you have a group "admins" and the registered user selects admins from the custom user fields, he will immediately see all section that this group can see. It is up to you if you want to trust them to make the right choice.

 

[Paul B]

I would go with the custom user field approach.

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/using-custom-user-fields-with-user-group-promotions.4008/

 

[Sabermaster]

Thanks for both your advices, as they provide me with confirmation of the idea, both about the feasibility and the issues with it.

If of course you trust your members. Cause let's say you have a group "admins" and the registered user selects admins from the custom user fields, he will immediately see all section that this group can see. It is up to you if you want to trust them to make the right choice

The trust does not extend that far. Basically on registration they must choose a custom user field that ist currently only used to display their function in the message fields. Basically, they can choose wether or not they are a "flight attendant" or a "purser", that would put them in the "cabin crew" group. Or they can select that they are "first officer", "commander", "instructor" or "examiner" which would all put them in the "cockpit crew" user group.

No such thing as making them admins by promotion, which wouldn't help anyways besides giving them a few more viewing permissions, since admin rights need to be assigned separately from the user group.
But since it is a closed community for employees only I have no reason not to trust them on this. Of course a flight attendant could register herself as a pilot just by clicking the custom user field option that implies as much and would get rights to access the pilots forum, but she would not have the rights to view her native flight attendant forum. (plus everyone would know straight away, because someone will notice that a name that does not belong to the cockpit crew is suddenly present) By making the field unedditable for users I can control access that way.
Then again once she has used her company email address to register, that is locked to her account and no one in the company (except maybe the IT system admin) has more than one email address.

If anyone gets promoted, I need to adjust this manually, but this is more easy to edit, as their new position does not have additional rights in the forum and I just do this once a month when HR sends out their email about these things. I can take my time on that one. (And in 15 years of flying I know of two cases that a flight attendant made it to be a pilot, so that case is not under consideration as it is too rare.)