General > Off-Topic

Groups vs. Teams - Why having an owner group is useless and stupid

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MrPresident:
Garry's Mod handles players in two different ways:

groups - This is a behind the scenes, player tracking system for the purpose of assigning rights within the game and some addons/gamemodes.

teams - This is how players are displayed to other players. (IE: On the scoreboard, or when hovering over a player in some gamemodes)

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By default Garry's Mod only has 3 groups. Those groups are superadmin, admin, and user.
According to Garry's Mod a superadmin is on the top. There is not much someone with the superadmin group can not do. Players with the admin group have a little less privilege but are still considered administrators by garrysmod standards.

Without any kind of scoreboard or group to team modification, there is no way you would know what player was in what groups.

UTeam (which is shipped stock with ULX now) takes players in groups and assigns them into teams. Some gamemodes handle their own teams. The TEAM is what displays to other players and this is how they know who you are and what group you are in.

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Some server owners find it necessary to create a group higher than superadmin for themselves and call it something else, like owner. The only problem with this is that you have now prevented some stock gmod functions from seeing you as the top level admin, even though you are. Also, by nature you will then assign other users to the superadmin group and now they have more power than they probably should have (even if you've restricted it by ULX standards .. superadmin is still the default highest group and most addons and gamemodes will treat it as such)

With the UTeam plugin, you can call any group whatever you wish. A solution to this issue is to simply CALL the superadmin group 'Owner' if you wish. By doing this, you ensure that only the top level admin is receiving the top level group. Calling the admin group 'Administrator' or creating another group and having it inherit admin allows you to have other groups for different levels of administrators without giving them that root superadmin access.

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All of that being said, I die a little on the inside when I see requests for help creating an Owner group and having it inherit the superadmin group because I know that those people are then going to turn around and grant superadmin access to players who probably don't need everything that comes with it.

That's the end of my rant. If anyone has any questions regarding this topic, feel free to ask.

Megiddo:
I agree with you completely.

One technical comment though, if someone creates a group called "owner" and make it inherit from "superadmin", ply:IsSuperAdmin() will return true for that player in the "owner" group (ULX modifies the IsAdmin() and IsSuperAdmin() functions to do this). I still find it odd that people would want to create a group higher than "superadmin" which is supposed to be equivalent to the Linux "root" (I've never heard of Linux users wanting an account higher than "root" before).

MrPresident:
That's just it. 'superadmin' should be their top group. Call it owner with UTeam if you so wish, and that's the point I was trying to make with my post.

sabo:
I personally was not aware of how Garry's Mod handles the groups.

I knew Superadmin is highest by default so I did not try and change it.

However I have some custom commands which shall not be granted to "special"admin (superadmin), they should be granted to the owner only.

When I setup the groups and commands for everyone I started looking for new ways to protect the higher authorities.

If I would have been aware of the things stated in this thread I would have simply renamed superadmin to owner and made the lower ranks inherit from admin/user but not for owner(superadmin).

Well I guess it is too late now because it is a pain in the ass to change it at the moment. I would have to remove all the users/groups - basically restore to 0 (default ULX) and then work the way you suggested in here. After I would be done with making the groups Id still have to add the people back to their groups ... unless I use the same names (just different order/inherit) and backup the user.txt file and just upload it back to the server when I am done with the groups lol - I guess thats too easy to be real :D


tl;dr: If I would have been aware of the things I would have done it the way you said - completely agree with you.

Ill remember this for the future ;)

Well written for a rant btw hahah :D

MrPresident:
No worries, it was half a rant and half a public service announcement. :P

I figured 9/10 people didn't know this information (based on the number of people who try and create groups higher than superadmin) and figured if I could help some people understand it better, why not. :)

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