Limit on the number of public groups?

[shawno]

Hello,

We recently purchased this software and couldn't find any indication to whether there was any limit on the number of public groups that could be created?

Thanks in advance.

[Steve Machol]

There is no such limit as far as I know. How many do you plan to have?

[shawno]

Wow - that was a fast reply (liking vB already!).....

It was more more just of an open ended question to find out if there was a theoretical limit.

Whilst I have you on this usergroup's issue - could you tell me does vB have another level below 'public user groups' - I suppose something like:

"Parent" - "Child" - "Grand child"?

To give you an example of what I am trying to do is if I had a parent group called "Animals" and I wanted the existing public user groups to be broken into categories of say "Dog", "Cats" (ie child group) - is it possible to have under the "Dog" category a sub group that is for "Labradors", "Corgi" etc.

The way I see it at the moment (and I have only been using the software for a few days so please excuse my ignorance) is that the 'public usergroups' would become extremely congested with public user groups that weren't broken into 'grand child' type groups for a person searching for public user groups for say for "labradors".

If I am missing something here, please let me know.

Thanks again......

[Steve Machol]

The usergroupid field is type smallint(5). I believe this means by default it will hold up to 65535 entries.

The ability to have parent and child usergroups in not a feature at this time.

[shawno]

Thanks again Steve - much appreciated.

Whilst its not a feature at this time - does anyone know of anyone who is able to add this type of feature? (or should I post this question on a possible hack to vB.org?).

Again - thanks for your lightening fast reply!

[Wayne Luke]

As Steve said, the table will hold 65535 entries. However you will hit a practical limit at around a couple of hundred groups. This is because of two reasons....

1) Physical Memory. Every group and all its permissions are loaded into memory on every page load. This has its advantages but with a large number of groups those disappear.

2) Handling Permissions will become very time consuming on your part.

[shawno]

Thanks Wayne for shedding some more light here. Your first point I can see clearly.

In terms of your 2nd, that is why I would like to have a sub group. If that was the case I could effectively get someone else to have moderate that sub group (say in this case "Dogs") which would take away the work from myself and could concentrate on the main group 'Animals'.

The way it stands now - yeah - it would be one hell of a job that I am not keen on doing until I can find a way of getting some sort of hack (or maybe a wish list item for the next release?).

[Wayne Luke]

You can make a suggestion for child groups in the Suggestions Forum.

However, right now, you can already assign Group Leaders to public groups and they can handle join requests and such. You can also assign administrators to handle usergroup permissions within the Admin Control Panel. Add this to the fact the fact that a user can be a member of multiple groups and it is a powerful system.

What I was referring to would be a hassle would be Forum Permissions. They can be a bear to track if you have a user in multiple groups and hundreds of groups.

[shawno]

I might do that.

I can also see what you are saying and that all makes for a very tidy system. But the ability to drill down into sub-groups seems kind of important - consider your hard drive the way it is now - a series of folders/sub folders/files. The way vB is at the moment (which is still way ahead of the rest mind you!) is that you can only view all your files (in this case public groups) in total. Which isn't a problem if you have only a small number of public user groups. But if you have say more than a 1,000 public user groups (like you do with animals), trying to find the group 'Labradors' in amoungst 'Seals', 'Coral Trout', 'Snapper', 'Bull Ants', 'Green Ants' etc etc will get kind of messy.

Thanks again for your quick responses! Very impressed with vB!