Track Owning user of group and protect his roles

Patch looks very interesting, I will look into this. Thanks!

I was thinking of adding a "group author" before but chose to roll with a default role instead. My reasoning behind that decision was that I wanted to avoid an 'abandoned ship' scenario.

If a group author were to leave a group or cancel his account, he would lose control over the groups he had created. In an ideal world, we could work with a 'designate successor' scenario, but in reality that won't work out very well.

Protecting the author from being demoted or kicked by his peers is interesting, though. I've got a feeling this needs a little bit more thought, but your patch most certainly contains very useful code already.

So again, thanks :)

I've come across this problem now and I think that assigning the group creator all the permissions would be a bit overkill. As it stands the current drupal permissions related to the module aren't granular enough to allow for anybody but a site admin of some sort to be changing the permissions/roles of a group so all you have to protect against is the last group admin removing their admin role or leaving the group. Since this is the case all you really need to do is protect the admin role of the last member with admin permissions. So on the roles management page add a check box for each role that signifies it as 'administrator' role/s then before removing a role or membership check to see if it is the last admin role in the group. If it is don't allow the member to leave/be removed or remove that role. In the case of a group type not needing a group admin because it is administered by site admins selecting no roles should be an option and mean that there are no checks for the last admin.

The only thing i'm not really sure about is should the checked roles be treated as an AND or OR. Like should the group contain a member with at least one of the admin roles or should a group contain a member with all of the admin roles. How would global and local roles interact in that sense also? Questions upon questions.

I want to use this module to allow users to create their own group and manage the users themselves.

So my advice would be:
1. The group creator can administer their own group.
2. The group creator can administer their group members.

Of course, for security implications, remove the group creator's permission that assign a role to a user.

Great module, thank you.

Hey there, i'ts been hectic around the office, I'll get back to you as soon as I can :)

Okay zhongguo999999, I've got some time to respond now. Consider this a 'support request' until I've figured out which way I want to go with group authors.

For your use case, I recommend the following:

1. create a group role "Owner" (global or specific, your choice)
2. assign the "Administer group" and "Administer group members" permissions to "Owner"
3. set the group type's default role as "Owner"

Anyone who now creates a group, automatically gains admin rights for that group.

@kristiaanvandeneynde
Thanks very much for your reply.

This is a good solution.
Actually, that is what I have done.

But sadly, we can never be sure who is the author of the group. It would be impossible for me to limit the number of group someone creates. It would be impossible for me to restrict permission between author and admin.

Thank you again, I'd love to hear any suggestions y'all might have, or any insight towards doing this.

I am hitting exactly the same wall as the original author - need to protect group owner from accidentally removing herself from owner role. Unfortunately, the patch doesn't apply anymore as it was created against now non-existent /admin/group.config.inc file, so apparently the module has changed a lot since two years ago, when this request was originally filed. I second this request and hope that some good solution will be implemented to meet it. Thanks!

Have you tried the suggestion in #7?

Hi Kristiaan,

Yes, I am doing exactly like suggested in #7, however that doesn't prevent owner to remove herself from the role. And when she does then she looses view access to the group despite the fact she still remains a member of the group. Which is also not desirable result.

Hmm, seems like this feature request would be a good fit for a submodule or contrib module: role permissions. Choose which roles a member can assign or remove based on permissions. Something like:

* Assign role Editor to a member
* Remove role Editor from a member
* Assign role Creator to a member
* Remove role Creator from a member

Something along those lines would not only solve this use case, but potentially many others as well.

You nailed it, the "role permissions" module would do great not only for this module, but Drupal at whole.

Changing status back to just Active as the patch doesn't apply anymore, so no need for reviews.

We thank everyone for their collaboration on this issue, but as the D7 version is no longer supported, we will now close all D7 issues to keep the issue queue a bit tidier. This information won't go anywhere, it just won't show up on the list of open issues anymore.

Please see: https://www.drupal.org/project/group/issues/3163655 and https://www.drupal.org/project/group/issues/3203863#comment-14100281 for more details.