Hi all,

I have installed so many hacks over the past year that I've lost track of everything installed. I am having problems with random moderators randomly being granted access to private forums AFTER I set the Moderator group to not have access and even customizing that user's access masks. If I add another private forum, these random mods get access to all private forums once more.

What hacks, if any, would possibly affect access masks and might be a cause for this?

Yes a hack can cause this if you had accidently deleted the wrong or too much code during the hack install. To try to find out which hack caused this could be very time consuming IMO, so I would suggest that you grab Beyond Compare and check the original files from the original vb download and compare those against the files you now have. Hope this helps.

Trying it out now. Thanks for the tip!

I had this problem too and here's what I got from someone for a solution.

in /admin/forum.php

look for

$DB_site->query("INSERT INTO access (userid,forumid,accessmask) VALUES ('$userid','$forumid',1)");

put a double slash (//) or a hash (#) in front of it, these are the simpliest ways to comment it out.

Thanks, but before I randomly comment out that line of code, what does it do?

Honestly, i have no clue.. lol.. i was told to do it and I did it. So it solved my problem. What i think it does is automatically give the moderator forum access to all the forums. Not sure

Yeah, I told you about this fix.

When you add a moderator it finds all private forums and adds the moderator a custom permission through the use of an access mask. This is quite anoying when you have large complicated forum permissions and access masks as you have to go and undo the damage. Commenting out the line stops the custom moderator access to private forums being added, but still adds the moderator and gives them permission on the respective forum and child forums.

Just comment it out and see how much time it will save you :)

HTH.

Is this line not powerful enough to comment it out? I am still "enjoying" the same behavior of all mods getting access to newly added private forums:

while ( list($key,$userid)=each($accessto) ) {
// vB.org Remark $DB_site->query("INSERT INTO access (userid,forumid,accessmask) VALUES ('$userid','$forumid',1)");
}

you'll have to change all the masks to give them zero acces. But when you add new forums/mods it won't give them access again. You just have to set evryne for default

It all depends onhow you give people access. For me, an access mask permission isn't stanard, I use usergroups for everything as its easier to deal with large numbers of users. If you have many private forums and many usergroups like I do for hosted clans/projects, the new moderator gets access to every single private forum - which I dont wan't. It assumes you want a moderator to be able to access any forum.

If you don't need it too, don't comment it out. :)

You mean DO comment it out if you don't want this default behavior of giving all mods access to all private forums?

Comment it out if you don't want the mods to get automatic access