"View All Users" permission for anonymous Sites profile not visible

Question

We see some odd differences (possibly just since the last release) in the "Administrative Permissions" section of the user profile for a Sites anonymous user (Setup > Develop > Sites > [your site] > Public Access Settings).

On NA14 (partner DE), my profile has the following options under "Administrative Permissions":

On EMEA (EE), my profile has a different set of options:

Specifically, the lack of a "View All Users" permission appears to be actually a lack of that permission entirely. This is causing issues as we have some Sites code that queries a User record.

This functionality was working at most a month ago, so we are scratching our heads as to what has changed (and why the difference between the orgs).

Was "View All Users" revoked in the latest release?

Answer 1

This is solved (sort of). The new "User Sharing" feature was rolled out in the latest Salesforce release, and apparently revoked this setting on the profile and instead sets it at the Sharing Settings level. As part of that release, "Default External Access" was set to "Private" which affects Sites users. The fix was to set it to "Public Read Only".

However, I'm still puzzled as to why in our DE org we have a "Default External Access" setting in sharing for User, AND still have the old "View All Users" permission in our Sites profile. Any ideas anyone?