Removing someone from a group takes effect immediately

Taking someone out of a group used to look like it worked and not actually work. Search stopped listing them, the Effective Access view showed the grant as gone — but the person could still open the records the group gave them access to, and they kept that access until the portal was next restarted. Adding someone to a group had the mirror-image problem: the new member saw nothing new until a restart.

Permissions resolve a person's groups from a search that deliberately spans every partition, because a group and the grant that mentions it often live in different places. That kind of search returned one snapshot and then stopped listening, so the answer a running portal held was the answer from the moment it started. Membership changes landed in the database and were simply never looked at again. Access that should have been withdrawn stayed open — the direction that matters most.

Cross-partition searches are now live: they deliver the first snapshot and then keep delivering additions, changes and removals as they happen. Joining a group opens the group's records straight away, and leaving it closes them straight away, with no restart and nothing to re-run.

The second half of the same problem was newer spaces. The list of partitions a cross-partition search covers was refreshed on a timer, so a space created in the last half-minute could be missing from it — and because a live search only takes another look when something changes, a membership written into a space that young was checked once against a list that did not include it and then never again. A new space now joins that list the moment it is created, so it participates in live results from its first second.

A third problem hid behind the same symptom, and it was the widest: a single partition that carried no permission data of its own could silently empty every signed-in user's cross-partition results. Searching across partitions asks each one "may this person read this?", and a partition with nothing to answer from made the whole question unanswerable — so the answer came back as "nothing found", for every partition at once, however healthy the rest were. Such a partition is now left out of the question instead of ending it, which changes nothing about what you are allowed to see: a partition with no permission data never granted anyone access to begin with.

If you worked around this by restarting the portal after changing group membership, or by granting people directly instead of through a group because group changes "didn't take", neither workaround is needed any more.