Question How do i have 2 types of members but 1 has full access and 1 has limited access to the forum?

As my subject says i have an electrical forum where i have two types of members.
electrical workers who want a private site and the public .
I have set one category for the public and used jrpassphras e to allow automatic registration if you know the pass phrase( which u would if u are an electrician)for the electrical workers.
This works ok apart from when the public posts they cant log in and therefore don't get emailed when there is a reply to their post and they have to keep checking back to see if there is a reply.

My question is is the another way to tackle this problem? any creative soulutions?
www.sparkyforum.co.nz

cheers

See Allow only specified users to view/post (private part of forum)

Hi and thanks for the link iguess i could open up registration to everyone then get the electrical workers to email me with proof they are who they say they are then set permissions for them (messy) but i was trying to have it automated and less cumbersome.Hence the use of a passphrase.
How would other people handle different access levels of people? it it all email?
Thanks

I think I understand your situation. You want some automation, at registration time, to categorise your members into the "generalists" and the "specialists" and then feed these different classes of users with different forum content.

As far as setting up the forum categories is concerned, the information I offered you before takes care of the how things work by relying upon Joomla's inbuilt ACL security mechanisms. If, on the other hand, you want to rely on some pass-phrase technique then it probably comes as a disappointment to you to reply that I know of no such method that works in Kunena.

The approach is to have people register and then, somehow, categorise the membership. If I understand in correctly, you want this categorisation to be done seamlessly and automatically. The result of this categorisation is to apply different ACL rules for these "specialist" accounts.

The good news is that there are products that do this (although I, personally, have no first-hand experience how to use them). The alternative method is to perform the user categorisation manually, as we do here at www.kunena.org . We, too, have categories on this forum that exist but that are not accessible to the general public or to "limited access" logged-in accounts. Therefore the solution is not only possible but it is proven. The question that you need to wrestle with is whether a reliable, secure, automated means can be found to categorise your site membership or whether you're comfortable doing this sorting "by hand".

Ok thanks for your insight, much appreciated will have a hunt around for a solution

Good luck and let us know what you find.

Hi and FYI it appears Auto group is what i am looking for :
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extensi...ial-extensions/13228

Problem is i cant try it as my site is still J1.5.26! and i am not that confident to upgrade as previous attempts have been a disaster. Although there appears to be a better solution to jupgrade now sp upgrade.

Wait for a rainy day i guess

It's a 95% probability that the Auto Group extension for JomSocial, shown on the JED as a J! 2.5 component/plugin, will probably have zero chance of success in J! 1.5 because J! 1.5 does not natively support ACL.

Sorry. It looks like it's "back to the drawing board" for you.

I had assumed, wrongly, that we were discussing a solution that would work with the current supported Joomla platform. My mistake :blush:

If migrating from J! 1.5 to J! 2.5 is too difficult, as an alternative you could create a new J 2.5 site, install Kunena on it, put a signpost on your existing site to the new site, close the forum on the existing site so that (in effect) you would have websites - separate user account management systems - and run things independently of one another.

Just about to take the plunge and upgrade to j2.5.9 with sp upgrade, but if all i run is Kunena then i wont have to migrate? just do as u say make a new site but i would want to bring all my posts etc over to the new site then use auto group.
So i guess there is plenty of post on how to bring the kunena data over to a new site?
will take a look

Cheers