Question block administrator access to category?

Hi all,

I have recently migrated the site running the Kunena forum I managed to Joomla 2.5.# and am slowly getting up to speed with the new ACL.

One question: it appears that any user who has site-wide admin or superuser rights under Joomla automatically can see all categories under Kunena, regardless of whether they have moderator rights. Using the ACL, I have configured a category to be visible by only users in a given ACL group, but this category is nonetheless visible to admins and superusers;; Kunena, as it were, appears to override the ACL settings.

It doesn't seem possible, but I will ask anyway: is there anyway to block an admin or a superuser from seeing a given Kunena category?

In case anyone is wondering why this would be necessary, let me offer an example: I occasionally provide 3rd party Joomla experts with admin access to our site to undertake specific technical tasks. They don't need to read our private forum traffic.

TIA

cbrace wrote: One question: it appears that any user who has site-wide admin or superuser rights under Joomla automatically can see all categories under Kunena, regardless of whether they have moderator rights.

That is correct. That is how Kunena is designed to work. K 1.7 has extremely limited functionality in this regard. K 2.0 does not yet enable "action-based or role-based" access restrictions. It seems counter-intuitive to me that if you trust someone enough to give them administrator access, you would not also have the same faith that allows them to also see what goes on in the forum or carry out moderation functions as well. Obviously that's your business but perhaps the solution is more a "human" matter than a technical one.

Thank you for your helpful reply, Sozzled.

It isn't so much a matter of trust as confidentiality and privacy.

The forum I manage for a small professional association is a closed one with two areas:

The first is for all registered users.

The second is a private area for the Executive Committee to discuss society business.

It is extremely useful for us to give admin rights to various individuals with Joomla expertise to help configure our fairly complex site and manage user profiles in Community Builder, but these folks really don't need to be privy to EC internal discussions.

I hate to question a design choice of the brilliant minds who develop Kunena, but it seems perverse to override both the site-wide ACL as well as Kunena's own moderator settings. It seems logical that it should be possible to simply assign a number of users to a group, and to make a given categories in Kunena only visible to that group. I could understand it if users who were defined as global moderators had access to all categories, overriding the site-wide ACL, but in the current situation users with admin rights who are not even Kunena moderators can nonetheless see all categories.

Maybe in a future version of Kunena but, for now, you'll just have to accept the present limitation as (a) a fact; or (b) an opportunity to spend money to pay someone to fix this for you.