Publish a different Matix room into own directory

[psychopathio]

I just found out that from the "Synapse Admin" docker I can publish any matrix room joined by a user on my Homeserver into my own directory to be discoverable by other users, but under settings publishing is blacked out.

If a user on my Homeserver joins a room, it becomes publishable by the "Synapse Admin" & only the "Synapse Admin" can unpublish it.
In room settings itself the option is blacked out whether it's enabled or disabled by the synapse admin.

[clokep]

I'm finding the above description a bit confusing. Can you describe what you mean a bit more? Is the issue that an administrator on your homeserver is able to publish rooms, but a regular user is not able to publish rooms?

Including a screenshot might also help.

[psychopathio]

while using the "Synapse Admin" docker I can publish a room that is joined by any user on my homeserver into my own homeserver directory, which i think is disabled by default.

[squahtx]

I'm going to assume "Synapse Admin" refers to the https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin tool.

I'm having trouble understanding what the issue is. What are you expecting to see?

[psychopathio]

If I joined a room via federation from another domain by default under settings, I cannot publish it on my own homeserver & other users won't be able to see it in my domain's homeserver.
https://upload.sykorp.com/XCmKbp
But if I use the docker "synapse admin" I can publish it into my own homeserver
https://upload.sykorp.com/bNAT8t
https://upload.sykorp.com/N9pxXx
https://upload.sykorp.com/ygP41t

the button is blacked out by default and cant be changed under "element" room settings.

not sure how to elaborate more :)

[squahtx]

To be able to publish the room using Element Web, you need to have permissions to set the canonical alias and the room must not be invite-only. Synapse Admin bypasses the permissions checks because as a *homeserver* admin, you're allowed to do whatever you want with your own homeserver.

It's still unclear what options you're expecting to be enabled or disabled vs what you're seeing.

[reivilibre]

I think the terminology here is very misleading.

The UI in Element is also notorious for being confusing; see element-hq/element-web#13077 (and potentially others).
I looked at Synapse Admin to figure out what 'Publish in room directory' does (https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/synapse-admin/blob/95de50b925fc87224b7e722617e6397f8759bc3f/src/synapse/dataProvider.js#L254-L276).
It looks like it calls PUT /_matrix/client/r0/directory/list/room/:roomID. I notice the spec says that 'servers may choose to add additional permission checks'... Unfortunately that sounds like it makes it hard for a client to know if you're allowed to do it before actually doing it.
There's also an open issue, which I think is what you're describing: Element Web disables the option to publish to the room directory for irrelevant reasons (it requires you to have canonical_alias permission even though you don't actually need it) (element-hq/element-meta#287).
This is probably because of the above limitation (that the client can't know what the server's rules are).

As far as I can tell, this is primarily a client issue, but with an additional spec issue that the client can't know whether something is allowed before it does it (which I've opened as a spec bug on: matrix-org/matrix-spec#981).

Since there are issues in Element and in the spec for this, I will close this issue here since I think that addresses your problem and Synapse can't fix this without a spec change.