Members and Administrators

dotCommunity has a powerful hierarchical membership and administration system. Administration rights can be granted to users at different levels, and they automatically become administrators of all levels below that.

There are three basic levels of administrator:

Community Administrator

These are users who manage a single community website. They can control all aspects of their site, and can grant community administration privileges to other users of their site.

Area Administrator

These users manage a collection of community websites and can review applications for new websites within that area. The grouping of communities under the responsibility of an area administrator is often geographical but can be any way of collecting the communities together. It can potentially be split up by the order in which new communities are applied for, simply to spread the management overhead of running a very busy service. It can even be configured with no area level administrators, leaving only the other two types of administrator.

Area administrators have access to information about all the websites under their control - such as activity statistics and broken link reports.

Each area has its own community website, which has its own CMS and access to all the standard applications (photo album, discussion forums, petitions, etc).

Area administrators can grant other users administration rights of their area, and to any of the websites that they manage.

Sitewide Administrator

Each dotCommunity instance has one or more sitewide administrators. These users have control over all aspects of the system, can modify any community website, and review new community website requests for all areas.

They have access to more advanced user management pages: they can delete users from the system, and reset user passwords.

They can grant sitewide, area, or community administration rights to other users.

In other words a sitewide administrator can administer a whole dotCommunity service, an area administrator can administer all the websites within their area and standard website administrators can administer only their own site.

Application Specific Administration

As well as the three administration levels, dotCommunity allows fine-grained control of administration rights over much smaller areas of the system. For example a community administrator can grant administration rights to a user on a single discussion forum or photo album in their site.

This provides exceptional flexibility for administrators to facilitate collaboration between users.

Membership

While access rights are inherited down the tree of community sites - from the high levels to areas to individual sites, membership is inherited up the tree. Therefore a member (or administrator) of a single community website is automatically made a member of the area's community website, and of the whole dotCommunity service.

Note: This means, for example, that if an area administrator enables the Discussions application in their website, then all members of communities in that area will be able to contribute to the discussions.