TNG: Security and users

Your family tree site is a very personal part of doing your family research.  Years of work usually go into it.  This is your set of family photographs, your interviews with family members and the countless hours of hunting down sources.  So you do want to ensure anyone else coming into your site is trusted enough to take care of family business.

The User setup screen in TNG is where you “interview” potential candidates for this task, where you determine their “job role” and where you can “promote” visitors into becoming valuable editors.

So let’s go back to the User screen.  You are logged into your site and you are an Administrator.  Go to Administration >> Users.  First, note whether there are any user registration requests to process.  Those would be under the Review tab.  If there were any requests, the tab would show as “Review *”.  The next steps work for either the Review or the Add New tab.

In the previous article, TNG: Setting up users, the text entry boxes were discussed, so let’s move down to roles and rights.

A Right is something a user may do when they are logged in.  A Role is a predefined set of rights.  When you select a role for a user, the rights will be switched to a preset list, which you can modify.

Guest is the first role and the lowest level of access.  In fact, all that a guest can do is to view the information.  If you have login set to required, then unlike Public, at least a Guest can log in and view the information (except for living and private information, generally).

A Submitter gets to make suggestions, but not changes.  You can review all such suggestions and accept or ignore.

Then we have Contributor and Editor.  An Editor can add, edit and delete but a contributor can only add information, including media.  A media contributor and media editor is limited to working with media only.

Normally, setting a role for a new user works well with the default rights.  If you want to raise or diminish the powers for an individual user within the role, then use the Rights selections on the right-hand side.  You can also limit a user’s rights to any one tree and even down to a tree and branch.

Just below the Rights list, there is a set of checkboxes for further user allowances.  These include the privilege of viewing living and private information, downloads and editing of one’s profile page.

So you have a lot of flexibility over controlling visitors and contributors to your family tree site.  Be conservative in giving out these privileges.  That is not just a matter of trust, but also letting your new users to get familiar with the TNG features before they go crazy in overwriting your research.