Is there a way to make the forum read only without changing every member or member group permissions?
I did it through creating a member group with read only rights, and adding members, then deleting them from other groups. It is a rare occurrence and may not be worth the effort to add a one click type feature. There was a few times though I wanted it.
You could have enable the "deny permission" option for groups, created a group that denied the permission to create topics and replies and assigned it to all the members. :)
True. I created a permission profile called locked that inherited the read-only permissions, and then applied it to all the boards. If I do not look at the permissions structure for awhile it confuses me and takes a few minutes to remember how it works. I' am not too sure I understand it completely anyways!
You are not the only one feeling confused by it. O:-)
Simplify it with 2.0 please!
If you enabled the "deny permission" AND you set up the new group to
deny the relevant permissions (i.e. open new topics and reply to existing ones), any permission will be denied and the board will be read-only (except for admins).
If you, in the new group, just removed the permission, then nothing will change.
You can assign the "deny" to the regular members group and most the members will be denied by default.
Otherwise you can just change the profile of the boards to "read-only" and that will do mostly the same.
Of course if you set up a group to deny and you do not assign the group then who doesn't belong to the group will be able to write.
There isn't much more to understand then. ;)
I'm not sure I understand the next paragraph, anyway I'll split it up and see if I give you the answer you want. ;)
Of course, if you forget to assign a group to a member, this member will not be affected by that group and will be able to do what is not denied by the group (a bit confusing sentence, but it does make sense, I swear! :P). And
Here I'm not sure what you mean, but if a member has a group that grant a permission, and a group that deny that permission (like I explained before) the deny takes precedence.
I'm not sure what spams has to do here here...
I would think that if the board is read only, then registrations are disabled.
Priority is not based on groups or permissions. Then only level of priority is "deny" and "grant", deny has priority over grant.
Grant is additive, you cannot remove something by granting it.
Deny on the other hand is... well a removal of a grant.
It's the same in 1.0. ;)
Nothing has changed in this respect.