Sorry @mercime (and, yes, I’ve already read through the ticket in trac, along with the documentation, etc.), but Administrator elevated Moderators from within a community definitely do not belong in there messing around with Group naming structures and descriptions. They are there to merely moderate the internal content and behavior within the Groups/Forums themselves (like I need to tell you that, being that you are yourself a Moderator here on BuddyPress – and a hell of a good one at that if you don’t mind me saying so!), and that’s it.
With this proposed change, will newly elevated Group Moderators then also be able to delete and/or upload Group avatars once given these new permissions, or even change the Groups privacy settings at will? Not a good “fix” at all if you ask me, no matter what the existing documentation and so forth has to say about it.
I believe that the real error here occurred at some point in time within the direction of the documentation if anywhere, and that is actually what needs to be fixed here, and not with keeping on going down a road where the sign with the arrow pointing one on where to safely go somehow got turned around at some point and is actually now pointing off over the cliff, right?
Hugo ( @hnla) has it absolutely right here with his take on this proposed change within the trac ticket located at https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4737
If you look at our own Group structure within our currently-being-developed site at https://PhysicalActivity.com (which I’d personally registered all the way back in December 1999) you’ll see that we’ve got over 200 meticulously generated Groups, and with thousands more to come, that we definitely do not want members who have been elevated to Moderators digging in and messing around with when it comes to Group names and descriptions, among other things, and I’m guessing a lot of other folks (site Administrators) would feel the exact same way about it as well. Isn’t it enough that Moderators can already pretty much clear out the entire contents of a Group/Forum?
We do not allow our members to create their own Groups, and that is definitely by design. It would certainly create havoc and chaos if we then, eventually, had 100’s of Moderators running wild within our set Group naming structures, descriptions and so forth, especially with thousands upon thousands of Groups to have to keep track of in the future.
When we’re done here, we’re definitely going to be one of the bigger sites making use of the WordPress/Multisite/BuddyPress platform so, needless to say, and like a lot of other folks here too, we’ve got a lot of time, effort and money invested in helping to properly see this whole thing (the ultimate development and direction of BuddyPress) through as well, even if our contributions and/or opinions are just brushed to the side at times.
We’ll definitely be stripping this update out of the code when (if) it drops with, what looks to be from @djpaul, 1.6.3 in the next several days or so here.
If anything, this sounds more like an options type of thing (“Allow Moderators to Change Group Name and Description” – “Do Not Allow Moderators to Change Group Name and Description”), or even plugin territory for the few people who would actually get good use out of something as reckless as this.
All of you guys and gals working on BuddyPress with your time, efforts and skills are absolutely fabulous (and I know, because I’ve been working with and dabbling in BuddyPress since its inception when Andy Peatling was still running the show, and I’ve been working with WordPress since its beginnings as well, even going so far as to register domain names like WordBlog.com, CustomerBlog.com, NoteBlog.com and so forth to use in conjunction with it way back in 2003/2004), so please don’t take this as anything more than me just tossing a little dirt (with a pinch of love) into the gears in the hopes of getting people to stop and take a second, or even third, look into a quick and hastily made change that just shouldn’t be made in the first place.
You know what they say about fixing something that isn’t broken…
Thanks for lending an ear or two to me here. Keep up the good work!
Best regards,
Kyle
