JavaRanch successfully cutover to our new forum software yesterday.  Unsurprisingly, we had a variety of small problems that cropped up.  One of them was the fact that anonymous users were able to post.

Below follows the thought process and steps involved in fixing it.  And then in fixing the problems caused by the fix!

• A moderator noticed anonymous users can post – that’s not good
• I looked at “general” group and saw deny anonymous posts was selected for all forums.  This looks right.  Hmm.  What’s the fastest thing I can change to prevent anonymous users from posting?
• I know!  I’ll create a new group, put anonymous in it and give that group read only access.
• Seems to work.
• I logged a bug that when not logged in we see “new topics” in one stray place.  (At the time this doesn’t seem related.)
• Things seem stable.  Time to get off the computer and enjoy Saturday night.
• Another moderator asked why that was a bug since he gets redirected to login at that point. (This moderator is in Europe and had a good chunk of Sunday before I woke up.  It’s nice how things get done around the world.)
• Chat session with this moderator – we realized he saw one behavior on our sandbox and I saw the error in production.  We discussed the behavior on test is correct/desired.  I need to figure out why it doesn’t work that way in production.  End chat session.
• I wonder if the database is out of synch due to our data migration yesterday.
• I edit ed the new group to force a database update.  If the database wasn’t out of synch, this doesn’t hurt anything.
• I opened a new browser and tried accessing when logged out.  I get the expected behavior now.  I see the button and am prompted to login when I click it.
• Now to tie up loose ends – I made the same “change” (edit without changing anything) to the “general” group, moved anonymous back there and got rid of the group created yesterday.
• Marking it off on the bug list and all done.