User roles - overview of permissions and what they do

What permission level or setting is required to give an employee the ability to post an Article?

For this, a user would need the “Forum Moderation” user role. With this they can create content and see it once published.

Hi @Julian. I’m trying to set it up so that those with permission to “Badges” can manually award a badge to community members.

When testing, I can access the Badges overview page and click “Edit” for existing badges, but the screen goes blank when I click “Award badge to users.”

Is this expected behavior?

inSided has deployed some new features in the past months that - in my opinion - have implications on the permissions for the custom roles.

• Email campaigns (enable / disable the function; setup campaigns)
• Email template (customize)
• Moderation automation rules (enable / disable; customize)
• Pre-moderation rules (enable / disable; customize)
• SEO: robots.txt
• Event types (create, customize)
• Ideation status (create, customize)
• Product Areas (create, customize)
• Experimental features (enable / disable; customize)
• Integrations / Apps (setup, customize)
• Frontend theming (colors, buttons, fonts, etc.)
• Homepage customization (general widget administration, special widget customization)

How are you planning on adding custom permissions to these actions? I think that it is necessary to have granular permissions for them as each of them can be assigned to different people and it shouldn’t be limited to community managers and admins to - for example - customize the “Featured topics” widget on the homepage or customize the Ideation. 

Hi both!

@LPortalupi we have checked this, basically it would require the “User” permission as well, as you are accessing the user database here. The “Badges” permission only allows you to change the settings of a Badge itself. Probably it would be better to hide this button in the overview page for users who do not have this permission. So it is expected behaviour, however we could have designed the UI a bit better here - hopefully we can improve this in the future.

@bjoern_schulze thanks for the question. Yes, we also see the growing need to improve the permissions, no doubt. There are multiple things that we’d like to see in the platform next year that touch on this topic. Not just more granular permissions in general, but it is likely that we also more primary user roles for specific use cases (e.g. content creator or product manager). This will hopefully help you to manage access rights better, but also should help you on the reporting side by having a clearer segmentation of users that are active on your community. We will reach out to you via our community once we start realizing our vision here, to make sure all use cases (e.g. your notion of frontend permissions) are covered as good as possible.

@Julian , extending the discussion around Moderators.

Moderators: It is an advanced responsibility that can be shared across user types (Employees and even for more matured Communities Customers and Partners who can volunteer) is a niche club who take on Moderation nature of responsibilities.

However I want to empower the general ‘Content creator’ tribe and enable the platform featureset per Role, like lets say:

1. All Registered Users can create Questions, Ideas
2. Employees: Can create Events and Articles in addition to #1
3. Employees and Customers can create Groups

Can you point me to documentation where I control the Content type per user persona? The admin console seemed restrictive.

I’ve got myself in a bit of a muddle here, hoping someone can help. 

When a user reaches a rank, let’s say ‘Super user’ rank, they can (and probably should) have the setting turned on to ensure they get the related ‘Super user’ custom role applied. 

So far so good. That’s what we have done. 

Where I need help with is that, if we look at the settings for our ‘Super user’ custom role, it’s not showing up as providing any extra permissions as other roles. I happen to know that our super users have unlimited edit time on their posts, they can assign best answers that aren’t their own questions and more.

Where are these extra permissions laid out @Julian, if not in the ‘Custom role’ section? 

Thanks Tim for taking time to share your feedback and your question here!

I once took the time and wrote down an overview of primary (and custom) user roles on inSpired, just for this very purpose:

• Primary roles & custom roles - what are they for and what can I do with them?

I do agree however that this could be solved in a more easy-to-find way within the Control environment itself. We do have ambitions to have more guidance and explanation of features in the future, so that each user will get a better overview of all the characteristics of an individual user role. 

Hope this helps, let me know if there is anything!

Thanks @Julian - I get ittttt,

For anyone else unsure (it’s probably just me): the Primary role has 3 built in characteristics that can’t be changed: 

With this role they are able to mark a response in a question as the correct solution, they also do not have a limit on editing their posts (60 min by default). Also, their posts will not be touched by the spam detection (should this be activated on your community).

Additional access and permissions are viewed and edited via the custom role route. 

Primary role: Registered user

Custom role: x with access to Moderation

It seems that they have access to the Control but they dont get Control “menu bar” to the community where to access to the Control? Same but different: They have to go to the Control using link to the backend?

Hi terore,

first of all, congratulations for posting 100 replies on our community!

So I’ve double checked this on a test environment, it is correct that this “Control” button is not being displayed in the frontend, so users would have to manually access Control via url. I believe that we currently only show this for primary roles that have access rights to Control. 

I understand that this is a bit uncomfortable: With this button you can open the same page in Control, now you’d need to e.g. manually copy parts of the url to then paste it behind the Control domain.

I personally do not think that there is a good reason why this has not been added for this permission, it might simply was overlooked when we introduced this button in the frontend. I will share it with our UX / product team so that we add it to our backlog.

Please let me know if you have more questions or feedback here!

Thanks, twice