usergroup - forum permissions: best strategy to show/hide forums w/many grps/forums
 

My board has a large number of forums and usergroups. I largely use these to enable email integration, however I've run into a situation where I need to selectively show/hide forums to certain groups. I'd (naively) assumed this would be straightforward but it seems not.

My group setup:
- I have different "clients" who are are course providers, they have a 4 letter code (e.g. AXAB, YABC etc),
- each course has a group: e.g. AXAB101, AXAB102

Assume for purposes here that I have 3 forums, a category AXAB, and two subforums AXAB101, AXAB102

I would have assumed that if I set privileges for the groups to ALL NO and only enabled privileges for each forum/group (eg: ALL YES for AXAB101 group in AXAB101 forum) that students enrolled in the AXAB101 forum would see AXAB101 etc This doesn't seem to work.

Can someone clearly explain how the usergroup privilege masking works. If a user is assigned to two groups one of which has all privileges for a forum NO, the other all privs YES, will the user see the forum? (i.e. will the YES superceed the NO)

I've spent most of the afternoon tinkering with this and I cannot for the life of me make it work. It's not helped by the fact my board has a huge number of forums and groups making navigation of the forum privileges screen a nightmare (guys - this one desperately needs an interaction designer on the case...) I haven't looked at VB4 for this yet, but I sincerely hope they have addressed this (mess)...

Thanks in advance for any responses. Honestly, the topic might be as interesting as pulling teeth, but, well, I need a dentist...

~ Rodney