"Can't Start Discussion" until navigating into tag

PrimaryFeather

When a logged-in user visits my forum, it looks like this:

As you can see, the user can't start a new discussion. This changes when he/she clicks on one of the tags:

That means people can post, but I'm sure there will be users who don't understand how to post. And since this setup is very similar to this Flarum forum, I know that this is not how it's supposed to be!

Here's how the tags are set up:

Is this wrong? I'd like people to always select one main tag (like "Starling") and one sub-tag (like "General").

To be honest, I'm somewhat confused by the difference between a sub-tag (i.e. anything that's hierarchically below a primary tag) and secondary tags. I know this setup says it requires exactly one secondary tag, even though there are none; but except for the issue about having to navigate "into" a primary tag before being able to post, this seems to do exactly what I want.

[BTW, I'm on the very latest version of Flarum (v1.1.1) and the only non-standard extension I installed is Byobu (private discussions). However, deactivating that doesn't make a difference.]

[And one more thing: admin users are not affected by this issue. They're always seeing the "Start Discussion" button.]

Any help is appreciated — thanks a lot in advance!

clarkwinkelmann

PrimaryFeather can you share a screenshot of your Permissions page? Are you using any tag-scoped permissions (additional permission columns on the Permissions page)

I'm not sure but it could be related to the fact there's a minimum requirement of 1 tag for both primary and secondary. You could try setting them to zero temporarily to see if anything changes.

There's a permission to bypass tag requirements that admins always have, so this is probably why admins can use the button.

luceos

clarkwinkelmann I'm not sure but it could be related to the fact there's a minimum requirement of 1 tag for both primary and secondary. You could try setting them to zero temporarily to see if anything changes.

That's not it I think.

My assumption is that the global create discussion permission is set to something else than members.

PrimaryFeather

Thanks for your suggestions, guys!

luceos My assumption is that the global create discussion permission is set to something else than members.

No, that's not it, unfortunately. (I guess you mean the Start Discussion permission?)

clarkwinkelmann can you share a screenshot of your Permissions page? Are you using any tag-scoped permissions (additional permission columns on the Permissions page)

I'm not using tag-scoped permissions. Here is the screenshot of my permission settings:

clarkwinkelmann I'm not sure but it could be related to the fact there's a minimum requirement of 1 tag for both primary and secondary. You could try setting them to zero temporarily to see if anything changes.

Yes, that fixes it. However, it's also not what I want. 😉

clarkwinkelmann There's a permission to bypass tag requirements that admins always have, so this is probably why admins can use the button.

Exactly. When I change that permission ("Bypass tag requirements"), the problem goes away, too. But, again, I'd like to have all posts require to have exactly one primary and one sub-tag.

SychO

PrimaryFeather I'd like to have all posts require to have exactly one primary and one sub-tag.

You can't require that by default unfortunately, both those (for example Starling and General) are primary tags, there is no way by default to require that a child tag be specified.

PrimaryFeather

SychO You can't require that by default unfortunately, both those (for example Starling and General) are primary tags, there is no way by default to require that a child tag be specified.

Ah, I see! That would explain it, of course.

What's still strange, though, is that it actually kind of works. You see, as soon as someone "navigates into" a primary tag, the button "Start Discussion" becomes active. And then he/she is forced to choose a sub-tag – you can't e.g. post into "Starling" without choosing a sub-tag like "General". So it actually behaves just as I want it to; it's really just that the button on the main page doesn't work as I'd expect.

(Edit: what I didn't notice before is that if someone wants to save that post, he/she received an "access denied" message.)

However, I actually do not understand why it works, given my settings regarding tags. After all, I require exactly one secondary tag, but I have none. (So I figured, sub-tags are somehow equivalent to secondary tags, but that's probably not really the case.)

SychO

PrimaryFeather However, I actually do not understand why it works, given my settings regarding tags. After all, I require exactly one secondary tag, but I have none.

It's misleading in the perspective of the admin, since you can bypass the requirements, but not your normal members. Which is something we want to fix in the UI to be more clear.

If on the other hand your members are also creating discussions with no secondary tags despite the minimum requirement being 1, there would be an issue then 🤔

PrimaryFeather

SychO

Actually, you are right – with these settings, it was impossible to start a new thread for normal users.

I didn't even notice this right away, because answering existing threads was possible, of course. So this must be something that changed since the beta release of Flarum. I only upgraded to 1.x last week (I was blocked from updating to version 1.0 for some unrelated reasons); and in the 0.x line of releases, it worked as I originally intended it (all posts with exactly one primary- and one sub-tag).

Okay, so I'm removing the requirement "1 to 1 secondary tag" so that people can post again – and that also fixes the button on the start page, of course.

On the long run, it would be great if there was a possibility to force posts to be placed exactly in one sub-tag. So I guess my message changed from "bug report" to "feature request". 😁

Thanks a lot for your help!!

PrimaryFeather

There is still something that's a little weird, though.

Now I changed to the following settings:

Required Number of Primary Tags: 1 to 1
Required Number of Secondary Tags: 0 to 1

With those settings, I'm rather close to what I wanted to achieve in the first place: when a user picks a primary tag, he/she is shown a list of sub-tags to choose from (though he/she doesn't have to choose a sub-tag).

However, the reason why this works is confusing to me. I had to add that 0 to 1 option for secondary tags, even though I'm not using any. But without that setting, the tag picker never shows the option of selecting the sub-tag.

Using PT: 1 to 1 & ST: 0 to 0, users can only pick a primary tag ("Starling") but no sub-tag ("General"). Makes sense, because after picking the primary tag, the count is "1", after all.
Using PT: 1 to 2 users can pick two primary tags (like "Starling" and "Libraries"), but no sub-tags.
So I tried that 0 to 1 setting for secondary tags, which leads to the described behavior. I'm happy that it does, but I find it very confusing. Maybe really something to have another look at, usability-wise, in a future update.

So I'm really just posting this to provide some feedback! I love Flarum, and you all are doing a fantastic job with it. Keep up the great work!