While non-admin Staff user roles can be somewhat accomplished with custom user roles, it’s not a perfect solution for segmenting the analytics or filtering topics/users by role in Control.
The reason? All custom user roles also have to have a primary user role and the primary role is “leading.” Therefore, your custom “staff” or “employee” user role is likely to also be either a “registered user” or “superuser” primary role.
This gets in the way of the utility for analytics and filtering in control. You might want to filter by posts from non-staff registered users or non-staff super-users.
In particular, the helpful “answered by peer” metric in the Success Dashboard would be more valuable if peer could mean “non-staff.” That would really indicate the self-service value of community members answering each other’s questions, versus staff.
Given that Moderator and Community Manager roles count against seats on the licenses (and that all staff do not need this admin access), we’re left without a way to filter out non-staff registered users. (Unless you took the pains to assign an additional custom user role to every non-staff member that signed up).
If there were to be built, my recommendation would be:
- Posts avoid spam detection (like superuser role without the mark answer ability)
- Option to automate users with an email with a specific domain to be auto-assigned this role
