User Roles

important

We're in the middle of some fast-moving changes to the Forem Admin experience, so we've paused documentation updates for the time being. You may find that the docs are now outdated in parts. If you have any questions, please visit forem.dev to request additional support. We thank you for your patience and hope you're liking the changes!

A user's role indicates the level of permissions they have across the site.

To update a user's role, you'll need to:

Find them via /admin/users
Click the Manage User button
Select their new role(s) in the drop-down

This is the page available at /admin/users

This is the page to manage users

Admins have the ability to remove any role other than the Super Admin role from users. Admins do not, however, have the ability to remove roles from themselves. To remove a user's role, you'll need to:

Find them via /admin/users
Click the Manage User button
Click the X button next to the role(s) you wish to remove

This is where admins can remove roles from users other than themselves

Base Roles#

Comment Suspend#

Users with the Comment suspend role are users that no longer have the privilege to comment on posts. This role is typically reserved for users who struggle to behave appropriately in the comments section.

Suspend#

Users with the Suspend role no longer have the privilege to publish posts or comments across the site. Typically, a user is suspended when they have broken the Code of Conduct or Terms of Use multiple times.

Regular Member#

A regular member is a user in good standing. They have access to all basic privileges (publishing posts, writing comments, etc) but they do not have higher access such as community moderation or site administration.

Trusted#

Users with the Trusted role are community moderators. They have access to /mod and see a moderate icon on every post.

Warn#

Users with the Warn role are users that admins flag to one another because of their previous behavior across the site. These are typically users that have broken the Code of Conduct previously but are currently not suspended. We want to make sure their previous actions are taken into consideration if they break the Code of Conduct again.

Users with the Warn role have all the same privileges as Members in good standing. Setting a Trusted User’s role to Warn will remove their Trusted privileges and return them to the same privileges as Members in good standing.

Changing a user's status to the Warn role does not automatically send an email to the user (we generally advise that users are notified when their roles change, including if they become Warned).

Special Roles#

Admin#

Admins have access to all /admin pages on the site but do not have the ability to make site configuration changes (i.e. admin/customization/config). We recommend limiting the number of people who have Admin permissions for your Forem; consider granting single resource admin privileges first, where possible.

Admins can unpublish articles by appending /edit to the end of an article URL and updating the article manually.

Resource Admin#

Single Resource Admins have access to select /admin pages. For example, Resource Admin: Articles gives access to /admin/content_manager/articles only. You can give someone as many Single Resource Admin roles as necessary, and we would always recommend granting these before a full Admin role.

Super Admin#

Super Admins have the highest level of permissions across the site, including making changes to /admin/customization/config.