Secondary Usergroups not Overriding

[K Software]

I'm scratching my head on this one because I've done this dozens and dozens of times.

I have a forum that I want to grant special access to. I created a secondary usergroup with "All Yes" set for the forum in question, selected that usergroup as a secondary on a user but the secondary isn't overriding the user's primary usergroups denial of access to the forum. It's the most straightforward thing in the world so I can't figure out where I've gone wrong. If I add read permission to the user's primary group it works fine and it also works fine if I set my new group as the user's primary group (but that's not what I want to do). If it works as a primary group then that tells me it isn't a usergroup-level problem. It seems like the secondary groups just aren't overriding the primary like they're supposed to.

Is there some trick I'm missing? I'm using 4.2.0

[K Software]

I was really hoping someone might shed some light here.. I'm still scratching my head about it. It seems so straightforward but it's just not working the way it's documented to work.

[stardotstar]

I think I have run into a similar thing.

We have a classifieds forum and general access is granted by the usual promotions to and assignment of primary usergroups.

When people abuse the privileges of the classifieds we want to be able to "ban" them from using the classifieds by adding them to a secondary user group.

So we have a group called adBAN.

When I set the permissions I just deny access to everything in the classifieds forum.

The adBAN group I have tried as a normal and banned group but nothing seems to allow the secondary usergroup assignment to take effect.

I don't want to put them in a primary usergroup because it will stuff up all sorts of other permissions.

Will

[Lynne]

In Usergroup Manager > edit the Primary Usergroup - is Allow Users to have Member Groups set to yes?

(Sets whether or not permissions from the user's member (secondary) user group memberships are inherited or not)

[K Software]

Wow.. Wow...... Wow. That was exactly it. Forest for the trees.

I've literally been trying things for 4 months to get it to work and somehow I missed that every single time.

THANK YOU!

[stardotstar]

Yes I have that set Lynne.
Seems highest level of permission wins.

[kh99]

Yes, the rule is that the user has the maximum permission allowed by any group the belong to. From the vbulletin manual:

The basic idea here is that if a user is in multiple groups and they specify conflicting permissions, the greater permission overrides. Thus, a yes will always override a no and a larger number will override a smaller number.
Note:
There is a slight exception to this rule. If 0 represents unlimited or no restriction, then it will override any other setting; it really is the greater permission.

So maybe you could reverse things and add everyone to a secondary group that gives permissions to the classifieds.