[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by crazy4bass

The problem with this methodology appears to be that you still end up hiding the fact there is anything to download from the user. The unregistered user either can't see it or they see a link in another forum they can't access. So in the first scenerio, why would they do anything, the assumption is going to be there is nothing to download. The second scenerio would end up turning on the hidden links so you end up with two forums with the same stuff in them.

Why not base this on the grup attachment properties. Consider a link to a file the same thing as a physical attachment, because in essence it really is that. So if it's clicked, and the usergroup doesn't have permission to download attachment the permission error is generated?

Quite a number of the recent questions have been about this or related points of visibility versus access. I understand that others may want to use the availability of downloads to attract new people to register. However, this hack was written from a different perspective, which is to offer different types of document to different user communities, one public, the other fee paying. In our case, most of those who are in the public category do not have the option (because of the nature of the association I run) to become fee paying (& so we hide the register button from them), and should not know that the other documents exist.

So the design objective was to build all access permissions on the forums permissions system for VB. That way, links and posts become equivalent, either fully visible or invisible, according to usergroup. There are one or two minor adjustments to that (i.e the can_see_protected_links_on_portal permission), to meet a particular user need. The decision was taken way back, and it would require a complete overhaul of the code to change it.