Usernames , access & permissions are still confusing me

This post

In the post above/below I asked about " guests " shown to be viewing hidden forums . I got a lot of unclear and unsatisfactory responses

View the whole list . Is an option that I sometimes use to view who is looking at what .

Code:

At this current time there are approximately 136 guests viewing my forum , 0 registered , 1 hidden ( me ) , and 3 bots . The bots are accounted for .

There are many different hidden forums in my sight only accessible by me .

There is one that is accessible to " members only "

And 1 that is out of commision . Not accessible to anyone .

I have asked this before . How then is it that there are 2 guests viewing the hidden forum accessible to members only and 1 viewing the gallery that doesn't even have any access to it ?

Because not even I the administrator cannot view these hidden forums without being logged in . Even if I have them saved on my computer . Your answers ranged from this being common to even members sharing these hidden forum links to others . Allowing guests to view these hidden forums at any time .

Those answers make no sense at all .

On a related subject . I came to my forum this morning 5/18/2024 after receiving an email for a response in a hidden forum . Along with a friend request .



First I responded to the hidden forum response .

Then I went to accept the friend request . I found that the user does not exist . Not in my username list . Not anywhere but in a response in a hidden forum .



How is this even possible ?

Remember that I am administrator . The only administrator . I cannot access these hidden forums if not logged in .

I ask again ? How are these guests and non members accessing hidden forums ?

How bad and poor and non functional is the security of my Forumotion Forum ? If these breaches are occurring ?

Please read and understand my questions and concerns before responding .

Something is not right .

Thank you

Paul


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Okay I now have an answer . Evidently this user deleted his account after messaging me .



It is curious as he did not seem disgruntled .

Who knows ? Lol .

Here is another excerpt from my previous inquiry .

SLGray wrote:Guests includes anyone who is not logged into the forum. ?So those guests viewing areas not ?access to be guests could be members not logged into the forum. ? Also members could be giving links to non-members. ?They will only see the log in boxes if the the areas are only access to members or staff.

Also if an area was access to certain groups, but then is changed, they still have the link to the area.

If a member or staff member has shared a topic in one of these areas on social media, search engines will index the link.

No other staff members . No other groups .

Again not even I can access these hidden forums , even with the links . If I am not logged in . Nor should anyone else have access if not logged in as a member . That is how I set the permissions .

So no more insight about non members , guests accessing private and hidden forums that are marked as available to logged in members only ?

Have you exactly logged off the forum and tried the links yourself?   All guests can see is what guests are allowed to see.  If they click or manually enter a link to an area where guests can not see, they will only see a page load with the ligin boxes.

SLGray wrote:Have you exactly logged off the forum and tried the links yourself?   All guests can see is what guests are allowed to see.  If they click or manually enter a link to an area where guests can not see, they will only see a page load with the ligin boxes.

Yes I have . And I cannot open any hidden forums or topics when I am not logged in . Neither should anyone else be able to .



But regarding my previous post .



You can see 2 examples of " guests " showing to be in hidden to " guests " forums .

In my previous post .

https://help.forumotion.com/t163098-view-the-whole-list#1145535

There are several statements made by the mods that don't make any sense to me .

IE :

SLGray wrote:
If I am a member and have access to the area, I can visit the area as a guest. I can also give that link to everyone not a member.

Even having the link does not mean I see exactly what is in it as a guest.

Guests should have ZERO access to the link .

Don't worry, you will often see guests on topics that no one could see except registered users. They are the bots from Google, Yahoo, Yandex, etc. that crawl the forums to index them, but don't worry, no information from forums closed to guests will be exposed on the website of none of them. The bots enter the forum as guests, so if you want to index your forum well you must leave the maximum possible number of forums open to guests for a while so that they correctly index the forum on the web.

marked as solved

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