kaberett: A sleeping koalasheep (Avatar: the Last Airbender), with the dreamwidth logo above. (dreamkoalasheep)
kaberett ([personal profile] kaberett) wrote in [site community profile] dw_dev2015-08-07 12:44 pm
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Brainstorming specification: granular community permissions

Community admins frequently want to delegate specific tasks to specific users; for example, I'm generally responsible for tagging [site community profile] dw_suggestions but for no other tasks; it's common in RP communities for a particular user to be designated the "coding admin", responsible for layout and styling.

In the case of tagging, there have been several suggestions about making tagging permissions more granular and for that matter more obvious to the user. However, even these suggestions end up breaking down permissions to a choice of: admins only, entry author and admins, members only, anyone.

In practice this means that either (a) work gets concentrated on a relatively small number of people who aren't necessarily best placed for the job, or (b) admin status gets given to a large number of people, none of whom need all the permissions they've been granted. It would be much better if it were possible for admins to grant specific permissions to specific users as required, rather than the broad-brush systems currently in place.

The difficult (as ever!) is designing a suitable system it in such a way that it avoids being overly confusing and leading to somebody giving somebody else powers that they didn't mean to delegate, and avoids decision fatigue.

The purpose of this post is to hammer out how more granular permissions might work, both back-end and front-end (in terms of what the options presented to community admins look like). Please do drop thoughts/suggestions/requirements/etc in comments; discussion positively encouraged.

ETA wiki page that triiiies to provide a list of what all community maintainers do
ninetydegrees: Art: self-portrait (Default)

[personal profile] ninetydegrees 2015-08-07 10:20 pm (UTC)(link)
Hmm. How about if I could do this in two different ways? Number one: pick a user and edit all permissions for them. That's nice for admin changes and other stuff which isn't relevant to most members as you pointed out (bonus points if this can be an ajax-y pop-up or a magic section like settings on the beta entry page). Number two: pick any setting (admin, add tag, etc.) or possibly several ones for bulk changes and have the table only display the settings I've selected. Could still be a big clunky table but hey I'm the one who picked too many settings... :)
Edited 2015-08-07 22:21 (UTC)
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)

[staff profile] denise 2015-08-07 11:44 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I think that whatever we wind up doing, it will wind up being loads of sub-pages.