Better Permissions controls for user identifying information
 

I run a forum where we want some parts public and some parts to stay private (members only). While we can set this at a macro level, there are situations in which user avatars, usernames, and signatures would be better not displayed to guests.

My solution has to been to go in and insert ($bbuserinfo['userid'] != 0) into the condition statements where I want the data restricted.

This basically sets a condition that "Not a guest user"

This works, but it's time consuming. I already know we broke inline moderation and so we are dealing with the outfall of that. I'm concerned that when we upgrade to 3.8.3 or 4.0 I'm going to have alot of rework to do to remodify and retest our site.

Our particular forum is an HIV Support group. We allow members to use a photo for an avatar, which has been very popular. Some members put other info in their signatures such as Twitter or Facebook links.

The current permissions scheme doesn't allow us to hide usernames, avatars, signatures, etc from guests.

I would call this feature "Privacy for members" and make it a checkbox feature that basically keeps the guest from seeing usernames, signatures, avatars, or social networking/IM contact info.

I can see security benefits to not having member names exposed.

Mainly it just gives administrators control over when and where information pops up.

To make it less "faceless" I substituted "a member" in most places where a username would have been displayed to guest. The mods needed to be done on:
- Main forum template
- Thread view template
- Postbit and Postbit_old templates
- Blog template and several related templates.

Alternately, maybe this could be done by Profile Privacy .... but I don't see places to call out avatars (which is actually different from profile picture), signature, and username. I also don't see a place to control social networking IM stuff.