DO NOT DELETE "Style Resource Readers" Group

So the other day at my customer, the site collection used for training just stopped working, that's what is said.

What stopped working is creating any sub sites, list, libraries.

The error was very vague and unhelpful. The SPS Logs simply showed  IO File not found shortly after trying to activate the "WikipageHomePage" feature.

While users with permissions could not create a site, site collection administrators could. So this is simply a permissions issue.

In researching this issue there were lots of similar cases. Most had to do with lack of permissions to the style/images/master page libraries.

This is when I found that the "Style Resource Readers" which by the way has a description that says "DO NOT DELETE" was missing.

This group normally has the following two accounts:

• Everyone
• NT AUTHORITY\authenticated users

The Group has the following permissions:

• Read
• Limited access

And has the following lists that is used in:

• Site Collection Images
• Style Library
• Publishedlinks
• Quick Deploy Items
• Master Page Library

So even if you re-create the group you may still find that users still can't create sites/lists/libraries.

That is because the hiddentaxonomylist probably has no permissions.

go to site/lists/hiddentaxonomylist

Add "Everyone" to the lists permissions.

This may not fix your problem, but it may help answer some of your problems.

Another possible way to fix the problems of deleting the group is to flip the Publishing feature off then on, both at the site level and site collection level. This should reset/re-create all the required items. Beware, it might cause additional pain in some cases.

References:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/default-sharepoint-groups-in-sharepoint-server-50855943-c151-42bf-b6ea-07f2bb366ecc https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/92862/style-resource-readers-allow-access-to-list-views

https://www.brightwork.com/product-blog/user-with-full-control-cannot-create-sub-sites-or-projects