Where in the DB are the Groups’ forum permissions stored?

[Stephen25]

I have a lot of forums and want to activate an option from the Groups’ forum permissions for all forums.

1) Where exactly is this data stored

2) A SQL query would be very useful (I'd try it out on my test board first of course and make a DB backup before running the query on the live board's DB).

Let's take the "Can search the forum" option as an example. How could I activate it for all users on all forums, or at least for all members of a specific group in all forums.

Your help is greatly appreciated! I've tried to solve that on my own, but failed.

[Thoul]

Group permissions are stored in the phpbb_acl_groups table. Individual user permissions are stored in the phpbb_acl_users table, but may also be cached in the phpbb_users table under certain conditions as well. Groups and members may also be assigned roles (which are essentially sets of default permission settings), which are stored in phpbb_acl_roles_data.

I would really recommend not editing permissions directly in the database if you can avoid it. A single query may not be enough to fully update the permissions, due the users table caching. It would generally be easier to create a custom Forum Role, under Permission Roles in the Admin Control Panel, with the settings you want. If you assign that role to a usergroup for all forums, you can later edit the role's permission settings and that will apply to all users in the group.

[Stephen25]

Thanks for your answer!

Because of the reasons you pointed out I will not directly change permissions in the database.

I have somewhat of a newbie question: On my test-board I realized that the "Copy forum permissions" function runs really fast, even on shared hosting and with hundreds of forums. Could I just update the group forum permissions for one forum as I want them to have and then copy the permissions to all others. When copying the permissions and marking all 500 at once, this includes not just sub(forums) but categories as well. Is this a problem that must be avoided (meaning I have to mark everything except the categories). What would be the consequence of copying forum permissions to a category (which phpBB let's one).

[Thoul]

I'm not familiar enough with how the Copy permissions function works to comment on most of that.

What would be the consequence of copying forum permissions to a category (which phpBB let's one).

In phpBB 3, a category is just forum that displays as a section header on the forum index. If the permissions are set to allow it, one can create topics in a category just like in a normal forum.