Sensei: Remove Access Permissions setting

[donnapep]

Sensei currently provides the ability to enable a user to view course and lesson content without being logged in. This is accomplished by selecting the _Access Permissions - Users must be logged in to view Course and Lesson content_ setting in _Sensei_ > _Settings_ > _General_. However, this setting requires careful configuration.

For example, what if course content is restricted to a membership. Would the membership control access or would this setting override that? What about dripped content that is not available yet? Would the _Access Permissions_ setting override that as well?

The circumstances under which this setting is actually applied can be ambiguous and open to interpretation.

I'm opening this issue to solicit feedback to find out how the _Access Permissions_ setting is being used. Do you have a use case that is dependent on it? If we were to remove this setting and change it so that a user was always required to login in order to see course content, would that be a problem for you? (Note that previewing a lesson would still be possible by selecting the _Allow this lesson to be viewed without purchase/login_ checkbox for an individual lesson.)

Let us know by leaving a comment below.

UPDATE: Please see https://github.com/Automattic/sensei/issues/2136#issuecomment-575232983 for final decision and desired behaviour.

[donnapep]

@lisaleague @andyadams I expect you may have some feedback on this. 🙂

[lisaleague]

If I were to offer free course content, it would be via checkout and “purchase” of a free membership with access controlled through Memberships, not Sensei. For example, I’d like to show the course description and outline, but am currently unable to, similar to: Allow logged-out users to see course content but not lesson content #1715

[LitKnd]

I would like for this setting to go away and for membership access to be simplified. I have had to troubleshoot some issues with course access not working like I thought it would, and this setting adds complexity to that process.

I have one course at this time which is entirely free, and like Lisa mentions, I do this with a free membership (and subscription in my case).

I do this for two reasons: 1) it makes it simpler for the customer later if they want to purchase something for my site; 2) the course has a quiz, which requires them to be logged in to function - so the free membership sets that all up for them.

[lkraav]

This option should probably disable its operation when Memberships is present and announce it such in the Sensei settings panel.

[PDowney]

This option has always made little sense to me. I'm for removing the ability for non-logged in users to view the full courses.

[donnapep]

For paid courses, access is controlled by whether or not the user has purchased the course, and this cannot be overridden.

But what about free courses? If we change the default behaviour to require users to be logged in before viewing lesson content, it would mean that course content on sites that previously had _Access Permissions_ unchecked (i.e. users can view content without being logged in) would no longer be visible to the general public.

Site owners could work around this by selecting the _Preview_ checkbox on the _Edit Lesson_ page for every lesson that should be publicly available, but that could potentially be labour-intensive. And this doesn't change the fact that this would be a breaking change for those sites.

[donnapep]

As per https://github.com/Automattic/sensei/issues/2136#issuecomment-575232983, this is too risky to remove. The setting will stay.