Newsletter group subscription inheritance problematic

• Usability

Imagine a simple group setup in which we have an Employee group and a Manager group. Every manager is an employee and so has all of the permissions of an employee, so we make the Manager group inherit from the Employee group. We put the basic permissions on Employee, and the special permissions of managers on the Manager group. Good so far. Now we'd like to have a newsletter BossNews for managers, so naturally we subscribe the Manager group to the BossNews newsletter. But by the current group subscription rule, this automatically sends BossNews to the Employee group as well. Presumably not what we want, as the BossNews is intended to have the inside scoop that only Managers should see.

Since the inheritor group generally corresponds to a subset of the inherited group, it is very unlikely that the current rule will be useful — subscribing the subset to the newsletter should not automatically pull in the larger set.

Even reversing the newsletter subscription inheritance — so that subscribing Employee to a group automatically subscribes Manager — may be problematic. The subgroup may not want to see the "chatter" of the larger group. Think BoardOfDirectors as a subgroup of Managers — they probably do not want to see all of the Employee updates.

So I would recommend no inheritance at all for group subscriptions to newsletters, since you can always subscribe both Employee and Manager to a newsletter if that's who should receive the messages.

Right now, I can only get around this by having each member in two groups, one that via inheritance gets the correct permissions, and one that has no inheritance and gets the correct newsletters. This is a significant maintenance headache, as all group assignments must be done in duplicate. Note the list of members of one of these groups for privileges and the corresponding one for newsletters are identical, but I have to keep them that way by hand.

A better solution, which I respectfully request the TikiWiki maintainers implement, is simply to eliminate inheritance in group subscription to newsletters: when you subscribe a group, only direct members of that group are subscribed. If there is an upgrade script, it could automatically adjust group subscriptions across the upgrade to replicate the old behavior in the new scheme. Thanks for considering this change.

This bug has been demonstrated on show2.tiki.org

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