Managing Membership Groups

The member base of a community can be organized a variety of ways. Classes of memberships can be defined by assigning different permissions to different groups. A member can be part of one or more groups in the same community.

Pre-Defined Groups

By default, the following pre-defined groups always exist in a community:

Founder

The founder is generally the founding member, ie. the creator of the community. There can only be one founder at any time. The founder has complete control over all content and community administration. He/she has the ability to delete the entire community and any user's membership. The founder status can be passed to another member of the community - this can only be done by the founder.

Administrator

To help manage the community, a founder can appoint administrators and/or moderators. Permissions granted to administrators can be modified, but they will always continue to have access to the community's administration area. The only administration tools they cannot access in the administration are those listed under "Basic Settings". Aside from basic settings and community deletion, administrators hold the same rights as the founder. Communities can have any number of administrators.

Moderator

Content Moderators only have access to the Content Moderation tool in the community administration area. Moderators tend to be assigned "edit all" and "delete all" permissions on select tools such that they can properly manage content. Content can be set to hidden until it has been approved. If this is the case, reviewing content in a timely manner is required to maintain vibrancy in the community. For this reason, appointing multiple content moderators is common practice when content approval is required. Find out more about Content Moderation.

Members

All new users joining a community are placed into the "Member Group" by default. Note that each end user can be part of multiple membership groups. They simply gain the maximum level of access allocated across the combined groups.

Affiliate

When affiliating with other communities, the founder can select which membership group(s) the visiting members will belong to. A pre-defined affiliate group is provided to encourage administrators to keep 'full members' and 'affiliate members' separate for manageability. It is good practice to create a new group for each community with which you affiliate to provide maximum control and visibility.

Owner

This special group refers to members' control over the content that they submit themselves. Settings for this group are in no way related to content created by others. For example, providing the right for the OWNER group to EDIT ALL means that a user can edit his/her own content but not that belonging to other community members.

Important: Be sure to only grant the Owner group the "Edit All" and "Delete All" rights for each active tool unless it is a group that should have administrator-like privileges.

Preview

The preview group is used by non-members when previewing the community before joining. Controlling when people are permitted to preview is controlled under Community Security.

Creating Custom Groups

Custom groups allow a founder to further organize community members into simple groups of similar users and/or to create membership classes (i.e. memberships with varying permissions).

Click the "New Group" button in the gray toolbar while in the Membership Group administration area. You will be prompted to provide a name for the group. After the group is created, you will see it listed with the other groups. No permissions or members have yet been assigned to the group. See Changing Permissions and Adding & Removing Members. There is no limit on the number of Custom groups defined per community.