This turns on/off the automatic publicity of group forums. If a group forum has at least one post which is public, than entries will be made in the database to indicate that the forum and its container are also publicly browsable. If a group forum does not have any public posts, then that forum will not be publicly browsable except as noted below in conjunction with other settings.
This allows group owners to decide which of their forums are public or private, but can also work with the auto setting above. First an explaination without the auto setting:
In each forum, the group owner (or admins) will see a link in the context menu to 'Administer group forums' which presents a table structure whereby they may edit forums' names or delete them, add forums to the container, make them public, make them private or reset them.
With the auto setting:
Forums and containers will appear or not in any browsable listing per the standard automatic rules unless overridden by the group owner or an admin. As mentioned above, the 'set by owner' values take precedence over the 'auto' and 'default' values when determining publicity or browsability.
Checking this does not mean you can't check the options above. However, the effects of any settings made under the above settings will not be appearant unless this feature is later turned off. This is either an easy way to ensure that all forums are always browsable by the public, or may be used to temporarily open the site for something like an 'open house'. Turning it off would keep in-tact any settings made before its use.
Similar to the other retroactive control above, this one manages publicity settings in the database for the case where you are upgrading from a version of og_forum without these features. As noted on the admin page, it should only be used once.
Although this may sound like simply turning off the 'Make all forums public' check box and ensuring that the 'Automatic forum publicity' checkbox is set, that is NOT what this feature does.
Should you use the 'Allow public choice' feature, but later decide that as site admin you would like total control of the forums' publicity, you may push this button and change all entries in the database to reflect a state as though they had always been managed by the 'Automatic forum publicity' feature.
Make sure that you uncheck the 'Allow public choice' checkbox, or else group owners will continue to be able to make their own settings.
1.5.5