Two group management questions

[stardotstar]

Hi all,

I have forums setup with a promotion from Registered Members to Validated Registered Members after four posts have been validated by super-mods to prevent spam and hunt down clever low-lifes/trolls and such that get past duplicate account detection, banning and so forth.

Importantly, with this promotion the Primary Group for any "real" and "active" member becomes the Custom Group: Validated Registered Users

As a result I have some two thousand members of Registered Users who never "made it through", bothered to complete their registration, ever post and so on, and the rest are in the custom group Validated Registered Users.

From that point on they can end up taking on various responsibilities and contribute to the forums in different ways. I am wondering if anyone has some good pointers for when one would change the member's primary usergroup from that core Validated one - I mean Admins and Super Mods? what about people who take on advertising - the "Sponsors" - should that be a secondary group or their Primary? I confess that although I understand the nature of inherrited permissions and the way that overriding primary group titles work, forum access and so on is done I still don't quite know when the primary user group should change - why wouldn't most members whatever their function remain always in the Validated Registered Member's group and all their other functions, entitlements and so forth be attributed with secondary group membership.

I hope this is putting my question clearly enough>?

The second questions surrounds the use of Public/Join Request Groups...

I have a need to add and remove members from a group of people allowed access to Event Management Forums - discussions on the management and coordination of "sanctioned" events. Furthermore this group needs access to calendars and so on.

So, I created the Public/Joinable Group "Official Event Organisers" - users can request membership from me (group leader) directly rather than by PM etc... The group is blessed with the correct permissions and so forth - and it becomes a secondary group - not their primary group - which sort of also harks back to my first question here - is that how this should be set up?

The comment "Anyone is free to join this group" in "Conditions" seems ambiguous in the group memberships page of the user control panel - perhaps "Anyone is free to request membership of this group" is more accurate when there is a group leader who can admit or deny access.

I am sure threads have been posted on these kinds of questions and I am reading widely now - but I would highly value any contributions to my understanding given the specifics of my forums as stated above.

Thanks all!
Will