The Boards email form sends email with a Reply-To which reveals the forum user's registered email address.

[D. K]

Thank you for the response.

[EA117]

Board sent email should not reveal the users email address. At best it should only reveal the user's registered board name (handle)

It sounds like you're looking for the combination of two settings:

"Users send email via board: Disabled", so that phpBB will not offer "memberlist.php?mode=email" as a contact method for the user. (Which is the email form where the recipient's email address will be in the "Reply-To:" field.) By default, this would mean phpBB would instead offer a "mailto:" link with the member's email address in plain text. (Which is also a behavior you don't want, but we're getting to that.)

"Hide email addresses: Yes", so that phpBB will not offer the "mailto:" link either, when you also have "Users send email via board: Disabled".

For your overall use case, it sounds like you might even also consider "Private messaging: No". So that in addition to not being able to have the board send an email via "memberlist.php?mode=email", and in addition to not having a "mailto:" link with the receipient's email address, your users would also not be able to use phpBB to send private messages to each other. Since you're describing this as being a non-encouraged activity, in favor of posting where more people can benefit from the information.

But this last part isn't strictly required for achieving just the "do not expose email functionality for members" behavior. You could leave PMs enabled, and then it would be up to the end-user whether they actually do want phpBB to email them when a new PM arrives, as controlled through the recipient's notification settings in their User Control Panel.

[D. K]

We appreciate the thoughts you bring to this subject. Thank you.

All of us are Non-Techies or at best have just enough skills to get phpBB running. We are really just content moderators and are not schooled in the phpBB & other Tech terminology. The most experience participant has been running a Ultimate Bulletin Boar 5.46 since 1993. In other words, we are not that young.

We are testing (i.e. trial & error) how to get things working. We are trying to get the phpBB working like we need it to perform before announcing the phpBB forum to our community of 1000 (who are also not that young or tech savvy).

We sense you are trying to guide us and greatly appreciate it. We will use trial & error to better understand and to do as you seem to be suggesting.

This will be a slow process for us -- Thanks in advance for your patience.

[D. K]

We have tried to make phpBB work for us but no joy.

We really need our users email addresses to be completely private. Many of our users want to be anonymous except for their forum user name.
If the board shows/shares/uses the user's name (forum handle) that is ok. The forums must NOT show/share/use the user email address. The only exception is that the admin can see and use the email address.

If the above means no user to user PM and no user to user email then that is OK.

Board level real user anonymity is important.

If the above can not be configured perhaps there is a simple hack we could do. Like commenting out a few lines of code so the following doesn't display:



Is there anywhere else the user email shows up?

If the above seems possible might we non-tech types get some help/guidance on what/where to make the changes? TIA

[thecoalman]

We really need our users email addresses to be completely private.

With the exception of sending email via the board this is completely configurable by the user. Note that email contact information is not hidden from admins or moderators. If you are testing this test with regular account.

Users send email via board: Disabled
Hide email addresses: Set to yes -or- if you want to allow the user to decide set it to no.

Suggest to your users that they allow PM notifications via email.

That is your solution if you want to completely hide emails.

[D. K]

...you are testing this test with regular account.

We are unsure what you mean. We have install phpBB and are testing using a registered user log-in.

Can we set the User control panel to default to NO. right now it defaults to YES.

How do we set the default to Users can contact me by email: No

[KevC]

You can do that with permissions

Permissions
group permissions
Registered users
advanced
misc tab
Can send emails NO (or NEVER if you don't even want the admins/mods to be able to do it).

[D. K]

You can do that with permissions

Permissions
group permissions
Registered users
advanced
misc tab
Can send emails NO (or NEVER if you don't even want the admins/mods to be able to do it).

We have done the above several times. Cleared cache. Deleted the user. re-register. And each test of the newly register profile comes up set to YES. We go back to permission and it is still set to NO.

Might you be able to suggest what it is we are doing incorrectly?

Thanks again.

[warmweer]

...
Might you be able to suggest what it is we are doing incorrectly?

Perhaps those users are also member of another (custom?) group that has YES as setting.
Use the permission mask to see how the end permission is reached: a NO can be overridden by a YES which in turn is overridden by a NEVER.

[D. K]

We used permission masks and only Admin & Mods & Registered COPPA users are set to yes. Every other group is set to no.

We can't to seem to find Registered COPPA users to make the change to no.

[KevC]

If you have the newly registered user (NRU) group on, new people are in BOTH the NRU and the RU groups at the same time until they get the required number of approved posts (set in user registration settings > new member post limit).

The YES permission from the NRU is overriding the NO for the RU group. To get around this, also set the NRU to NO or even NEVER in group permissions.

Or set the post limit to 0 to turn it off completely.

[D. K]

We are really feeling not too bright.
It's been hours...... We made the setting changes for NRU.
We can't get Users can contact me by email: to default to No

We are calling it quits for today. And will try again tomorrow afternoon.

If anything else comes to mind please let us know. TIA

Over all we are impressed with the support received. Thank you all. So we will continue to try to get phpBB to work as we need.

[thecoalman]

We can't get Users can contact me by email: to default to No

That's users preference, the default is set when the user is registered and only they can change it after registration. if there is no way to contact them because of permission settings it's irrelevant.

[KevC]

We can't get Users can contact me by email: to default to No

You're confusing permissions with user settings.

The permission is set to no so the user setting no longer has any meaning. All you had to do after setting the permission was to see if you could send an email.

[D. K]

I think we got it not to show contact.... now to test......

Thanks again.