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I’m wondering how evryone else is applying the different ‘roles’ to their users. It’s something I have never given a great deal of thought to but I have been triggered into thinking about it as a result of a limitation that one of my users has just signalled to me. My approach to date has been to regard the different roles as follows:

Visitor:     Any casual Internet user who finds their way onto my site and anyone else who does not satisfy my conditions for being issued with a user account.

Member: Someone to whom I have issued a user account. My conditions – they must be a member of the extended family and agree to their details being included on the database.

Editor:   Members to whom I extend the authority to make changes to the database directly (the changes being subject to approval by me)

Moderator: I don’t use this role

Manager: The very few members in whom I have total confidence to make changes without the need for my approval, and to whom I feel happy to delegate administrator responsibility on the occasions when I am out of action (hospital etc)

Administrator: Just me (and on the odd ocasions delegated to one of the managers).

I searched for but failed to find formal definitions of the roles (perhaps Nigel can point me to one?) and wondered how others are using them. The query that triggered this post was a user who had Editor status asking me why it was that she couldn’t find a way to upload media objects. On checking Family tree configuration >media >who can upload  new media files, I see that I had restricted it to managers (the alternative options being visitors or members – no option for editors) and I certainly didn’t wish to allow just any member to upload media objects. This led me to check other places in admin. where we have the option to limit access or visibility according to ‘role’ and I find that the choice always seems to be between four – visitors, members, managers and no-one. The additional roles of editor, moderator and administrator catered for in the user mangement are not specifically allowed for in all the places where we can apply limitations. There’s probably a historical reason which I’m sure Nigel can explain, but I’m left wondering how differentiation can be made in practice between the roles if the limitation options don’t extend to include them, and prompts my qustion – how does everyone else apply these roles?. For my part, I feel happy with the way I am using the roles, except for the inability to povide ‘editors’ with media file upload authority!

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14

clandav wrote:

For my part, I feel happy with the way I am using the roles, except for the inability to povide ‘editors’ with media file upload authority!

Have you tested that assertion? I have just done it and can confirm that anyone with the role of “Editor” can most definitely upload media files. That has always been the case, it has never changed, and is never likely to.

Note: best way to check that is to “masquerade” on your site as a user with the ‘editor’ role – perhaps ideally the user who contacted you – Administration > Users > Manage users — mask icon to far right of each user in the list.)

So, you have a user who “couldn’t find a way to upload media objects.“. We need to understand how that can happen.

In my experience helping users to navigate the complexities of kiwitrees (or any complex software) it comes back to education. It is also important not to assume that “couldn’t find a way” could either be taken literally, or in fact mean she didn’t look in the right place.

Broadly speaking media can be added in three places:

1. As unlinked media object in Administration > Media > Upload media. This is the one place an “editor” cannot access. That requires the roles of Manager (only for certain parts of admin, and a specific tree(s), or Admin.
2. Directly to  an individual (or other top level record). For individuals this is one Album tab. which is also the only place such media objects will generally be displayed.
3. As part of a fact or event (birth, marriage, death etc), or as part of a source citation on such an event. In this case the image is displayed with the event.

The other possibility is that your user has really found a way to add media, but it “was” (i.e. seemed) unsuccessful. That might be due to the inherent delays in admin approving the change being made.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

clandav wrote:

I searched for but failed to find formal definitions of the roles (perhaps Nigel can point me to one?)

They are slightly hidden away, but to hand when setting up a new user. Go to Admin > Users > Manage users and edit any user, or click “add user”. Scroll down to the “Family tree access settings” at the bottom. There is a Help paragraph there, partially hidden (for space reasons) with a “more” link. Click that to see the definitions.

The “Family tree configuration >media” setting you referred to is a generic setting that only includes “Visitor, Member, and Manager, common to most family tree level configurations. Editor, Moderator, and Manager are user AND tree specific sub-sets of Member. “Members” can remain just that, or can be given editor, manager, or even administrator roles. There is an extensive discussion about this here: https://www.kiwitrees.net/forums/topic/a-question-about-privacy/ It is about a change which is progressing through the kiwitrees-nova project.

Any user with the “editor” role can add or edit anything (individuals, families, media, shared notes, sources and repositories) UNLESS they are further restricted by other privacy rules or the “Restrict to family members” settings on their user profile.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

The problem would appear to be my decision that I do not want ALL my 330 users to have the right to upload media objects which would be the case if I set the tree config option to ‘member’ , so, given the options available I am obliged to set it at ‘manager’.

In the case in  point, the user was actually trying to link an already uploaded image by clicking on the Album tab. I had told her to take the ‘link to an existing media object’ option but she claimed she couldn’t see it – that the ‘page was blank’ . I asked her to send me a screenshot and sure enough, the options ‘Add a media object’ and ‘link to an existing media object’ were not there (see her screenshot below).

I checked that she was logged in – checked her ‘role’ in user management = ‘Editor’ . Checked the tree configuration for any apparent restictions and all I could see was ‘who can upload a media file’ – which, as explained above,  I had set to ‘manager’.  The only thing I could think of was to try changing her ‘role’ setting to ‘manager’ to see if that made a difference – she tried and Yes – immdiately she saw the media options as expected and she was able to apply the desired media object links.

So my definition of ‘Editor’ gives the user more authority than the average member, but ideally I would not want to give all those with media upload authority all the rights of a ‘manager’. Hence my post to find out how others were regarding the roles – maybe I have got it wrong!

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14

kiwi said

They are slightly hidden away, but to hand when setting up a new user. Go to Admin > Users > Manage users and edit any user, or click “add user”. Scroll down to the “Family tree access settings” at the bottom. There is a Help paragraph there, partially hidden (for space reasons) with a “more” link. Click that to see the definitions.

Ahh! I knew it had to be there somewhere – it is quite well hidden – thanks Nigel. The descriptions are very clear and basically that’s the way I have been using them except that I don’t use Moderator  (as the very few people I would assign those rights to can also be safely assigned ‘manager’ rights.). The only thing that I suppose is ‘missing’ for my purposes is the thing that prompted my post in the first place –  the ability to provide Editors with media update rights, whilst not proividing those to members – and I don’t see a way of doing that .

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14

clandav wrote:

The only thing that I suppose is ‘missing’ for my purposes is the thing that prompted my post in the first place –  the ability to provide Editors with media update rights, whilst not proividing those to members – and I don’t see a way of doing that .

Ah, but there is a twist to the rules. I’ve just tested it (first time I have for probably years). You might want to ‘masquerade’ as a “member” (not an “Editor”) and test what they see, because in reality the settings available for the field ‘who can upload a media file’ are just a simplification of the sub-settings like editor and moderator.

Do the test – I’m pretty confident you will find that because a member can’t do what an editor can (i.e. add or edit things) they cannot actually upload media files because there is nowhere available for them to do it!

Its about looking at the problem from a different angle:

• Member is a read-only role – everywhere.
• Editors can add or edit anything, everywhere, UNLESS you specify other higher restrictions, like ‘relationship privacy’, event or fact specific privacy over-rides OR, by setting ‘who can upload a media file’ to a higher level.

If anything is missing, and I’m not sure it matters, is the ability to prevent some editors from uploading media. You can only stop all of them or none of them by setting that field to ‘managers’.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

That makes a lot of sense. I can’t check right now as we’re travelling, but will do as you suggest when back home. Sounds as though I have created a problem that didn’t exist and all I have do to meet my needs is to set the ‘who can upload media objects’ to ‘Member’

Thanks Nigel.

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14