I understand this is how it's intended, but it's preventing the user pages idea if you don't want to have to pre-create the userpage when adding new users. I figured out how to fix this and how to keep the ACL from overwriting my rule (for anyone who is interested in this):
Allow create permissions for pages (allows users or groups to create a not yet existing page):
1) EDIT: /lib/plugins/acl/admin.php (Allow ACL to save CREATE perms for page)
Line 662 within function _html_checkboxes(...), change:
if($ispage && $perm > AUTH_EDIT){
to
if($ispage && $perm > AUTH_CREATE){
[/color]
2) EDIT: /inc/auth.php (Prevent encoding of user wildcard)
Line 521 in function auth_nameencode(...), insert this
BLUE code:
[m]
function auth_nameencode($name,$skip_group=false){
global $cache_authname;
$cache =& $cache_authname;
$name = (string) $name;
if($name == '%USER%'){
return($name);
}
if (!isset($cache[$name][$skip_group])) {
...
[/m]
Note this change only makes sense if you are trying to use wild cards to create dynamic pages. You will have to add this rule by hand for example to create a private page for each user:
users:%USER% %USER% 4