Member groups allow you broad control over what your members can and cannot do, see, and interact with on your community. Members must have a primary group (by default it's Members) but can also have multiple secondary groups. The primary group is what displays under their name but they also inherit the permissions of any secondary groups they are in.
Much of the core permission structure of your community will be set up in this area so take some time to look around at all the member group options.
Groups Listing
When clicking on the edit icon at the right of a group you will be taken into the group editing screen for that group. This will give you the tools needed to effectively and quickly manage your groups settings. You can also make a copy of an existing group for ease of setting up using the copy icon.
Editing a group
The edit group screen is split into sections on different tabs. Although most options are self-explanatory, there are some brief descriptions of what each of these are for below. (Note you may have more or less tabs than in the image below depending on the applications you have installed).
Group Settings Tabs
Group Settings
From this tab consists of various items related to the group over all and is split into 3 sections.
- Group Details - This is where you set the basic elements of the group such as name, group icon which will appear below the members name in various areas of the site, group formatting where you can add html to surround the usergroup name and also give a promotion to this group which will move any user within this group to another group based on criteria you set.
- Permissions - These are the basic permissions for a group such as whether they can access the site when it is offline or how many times they can change their display name (this is not access permissions, these will come later)
- Signatures - Various settings for a group relating to signatures for users within this group.
Content
Most elements in this section are self explainatory, however a couple of items in here are worth further explaination
- Uploads - Note that in this area it is a setting over all. So for example if you set "Total maximum storage space" for a group this is the total storage for any user in that group over the whole platform. Once this limit is hit a user in the group would no longer be able to upload any further attachments/images etc to the site.
- Deleting - It is important to note that delete really does mean delete. If you give a group access to delete their own content from the forum then they would be able to delete this permanently from the system and this content would no longer be recoverable. The permissions should be given lightly. If it doubt, use hide on the group so that you can recover the information if required whilst allowing the group to hide the data from the community.
Social
This tab contains various settings for social elements of the community such as how many conversations a user in this group can start in a day to whether they can post status updates etc. For the most part these settings are quite self explanatory.
Gallery/Blog/Other
If you have more applications installed you will see some common settings for these are displayed within the group edit screen tabs. This will allow you to quickly set up features for a group such as allowing a group access to create blogs. or setting the size of images allowed to be uploaded in the gallery.
Members can be added to one primary and any number of secondary groups in the members section of the admin panel.
Changing the Groups of a Member
Editing permissions
Permissions can be edited from many areas of your community for each of the groups that you create. From the groups section you can get quick access to these by using the lock icon next to the appropriate group.
By clicking on this icon you will be given quick access to permissions for many areas of yoru community in an easy tabbed format. Simply tick the boxes as appropriate and click save
Permission Matrix
You can see more about permissions in the following guide
Report Guide