I was creating a "rants" section on a FAQ-O-Matic where people could add their own subcategories for their personal ranting. I wanted to be able to give people the ability to add their own rants, but not remove other people's rants.

This became a problem because the subcategories had the same ownership and permissions as the parent category, which meant that unless I gave people permission to modify the general rant area's permissions, they also wouldn't be able to set their personal category's permissions/ownership.

Then, I found the "relax permissions on subcategories" option. After studying the code and realizing that it didn't do anything, I came up with a quick fix that solved the problem for me. With a few lines of additional code, if a parent category is marked as "relax", new child categories become owned by the person who created them. Granted, that person still cannot delete his/her own rant section, but at least he/she can change the contents fully at will.

in addItem.pl, after the lines:

                # regardless of what the parent did, we inherit moderator    
                # from parent rather than setting it explicitly.

                # BZZT.  That sucks.  Set it explicitly if relax is set.     
        if ($item->getProperty('RelaxChildPerms') eq 'relax') {
                my ($id,$aq) = FAQ::OMatic::Auth::getID();
                if ($id) { 
                        $newitem->setProperty('Moderator', $id);
                } else {
                        print FAQ::OMatic::header($cgi, '-type'=>'text/plain');
                        displayMessage("You must be logged in to add to a category if RelaxChildPerms is set to relax.\nYou should not ever see this message.  Contact your site administrator.\n");
                        FAQ::OMatic::myExit(0);
                }
        }