From time to time I need to elevate the permissions of a group of users. A recent example was when I created a FAQ discussion forum on our top level site in MOSS. Normally all our employees are visitors to the main site as we have special content managers for this site (it's a publishing site) but for this list they needed to be able to add content (contributor rights).

I've read a couple of different ways to handle situations where permission rights conflict like this and one golden rule I've heard is never to change the rights of a predefined group, such as giving visitors contributor rights. If you violate this rule you end up with a number of lists, sites and what have you where a visitor no longer is a visitor.

The "proper" solution, I would guess, is to create a new SharePoint group and call it "Contributors to this list" or some such, give it the proper rights and then add the users to this group. This is a rather cumbersome process though.

You could also add the users to the "Contributors" group but that would give them contributor rights to the entire site and that's a no-no - at least for me.

Lately I've found myself violating my golden rule more often than not by breaking permissions inheritance from the site the list resides in and then giving the orphaned visitors group the proper rights - simply because it's the easy way out.

How do you handle situations like this? Quick and dirty or by the book? Or maybe some other way?