Strange access behaviour for public content posted in closed/limited groups

Hello all

I've noticed some strange inconsistencies in the way content in groups is shown to those outside the group. To replicate it:

Create a piece of content in a group where 'Who can see the group' is set to 'Group members only'. Set the read access level to 'Logged in users'. If you log in as a user who is not in the group you see a river entry saying ' User x created y content' and can click the content title to see it. This seems like the right behaviour to me.

Now login as a group admin and change the 'Who can see the group' setting to 'Logged in users' and login again as a non-group member. The river changes to 'User x created y content in z group', but clicking the content title now gives you an error that you must be a member of the group to view that page.

I would very much like to have groups with limited membership but with openly readable content. At the moment it seems the only way I can do this is to have the group hidden to everyone. This is fine, but I just wanted to check before I started building a site on this concept that things won't change. In other words, is the behaviour that currently exists for showing readable content in hidden groups going to stay the same, or is it a bug and might it change at some point in the future to match the (undersired) behaviour being shown for content in groups that are not hidden?

Thanks in advance

Nick

  • If logged in users can see both the group AND the content, then they should see the content, so it does sound like a bug.

    I struggle with the notion of displaying outside-accessible content within a hidden group. Let's say it's a blog post. When assembling the page Elgg can't even load the page_owner entity, so does it just make it look like it's a post in the user's blog? If so, when you navigate to the user's blog front page, the content isn't there.

    In these cases I think the owner block should just have a message like: "You may view this content but we may not show you the group it belongs to."

  • Hi Steve

    Thanks for the response. If it is a bug, how would I go about submitting it?

    Also, in retrospect I think I agree with you, it is probably more appropriate that a user should see both content and the group, even if not all the content in the group. However until the bug is fixed or there is a hack to work around it I think I'll have to stick to open content that can be read in hidden groups, rather than open content that can't be read in visible groups :-)

    Cheers

    Nick

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