news client only usable by admins

[Cody A.W. Somerville]

Currently the news client can only be used by admins as that seems to be the default permissions for newly created groups. However, when you go to set permissions for a group, the news admin says no such news group exists.

[Kyle A. McKnight (kyle-mcknight)]

The fix to the issue of not being able to find groups is to either A) make it case-insensitive, B) make all groups lowercase and just display them as capitalized in the client, or C) the opposite, make them all capitalized when creating them and such. This is a fix I have done and it does work. I did not however push it due to the fact that regular users still can't use it seeing as in they are a part of no group, and therefore there are no permissions for them. That should be resolved before this bug is 'fixed'.

[Cody A.W. Somerville (cody-somerville)]

Are you sure the issue is capitalization? When I attempted to debug this issue, I certainly tried this and still got the problem.

The optimal solution would be to reference via a number (ie. when you go to set permissions on a group, it lists them all with an id number like we do in the actual news client). Ultimately I'd like to see it as user friendly as possible.

[Kyle A. McKnight (kyle-mcknight)]

Oh, I agree... the news client needs a MAJOR overhaul on looks/feel haha. It at least needs to conform more to the other tools we have like the mail client and such. But I test as thoroughly as I could on my own machine by myself. So please feel free to download this branch and try it out. The only 'issue' i ran into now, is that I thought it was still broken because when I did my fix a developer could still access groups i thought he couldnt when i put in 'none' for one of the news groups for developers... not realizing that developers were part of the intermud group so i had to change the intermud group to none also. ummmm but yes, my fix worked as far as I could tell.

[DaelasKai (aishiteru)]

I had a possible suggestion for regular user permissions for the news client. Certain administrators may want to have a news group for individual
guilds/ranks/classes/etc... My thought was why not allow a permissions entry such as "object;arg1;arg2". For an explanation, if I added a news
group called "Mage", then for the permissions for that news group, I set it to "/adm/daemons/guild_d;arg1;arg2", it would use call_other() to guild_d.c
and enter in the optional arguments to get a list of people authorized to either read/write/etc.. to that news group. This is just a quick idea so there
may be flaws in the concept. This would give some versatility to the non-standard news groups based on the administrator's vision of their individual
muds such as a race news group, guilds, etc...

[Cody A.W. Somerville (cody-somerville)]

That is a good idea DaelasKai (and one I intend to implement). However, I feel it should be implemented in the current security system instead of at the news admin client as other systems might want to take advantage of it.

[Cody A.W. Somerville (cody-somerville)]

I've removed the permissions system from the news system in lpuni-final.