Administration Instructions

The purpose of groups is to organize users and to allow moderators to manage those users. The Group Manager is an interface available to the board administrator that allows the addition and removal of groups, and facilitates the assignment of administrative privileges to moderators. Recall from the overview page that a group is simply a "container" to hold users.

In order to have any user accounts and your board, you must create at least one group using the Group Manager. Once this group has been created, you should assign one or more moderators to manage this group of users. (Of course, you not need to assign moderators other than yourself to edit groups if you don't want to.) Once the group has been created and editing privileges have been assigned, all manipulation of users within the group is conducted through the User Manager interface.

Deleting an existing group: To delete an existing group, click the delete icon next to the group you wish to delete. You can also delete more than one group at the same time by checking the boxes next to the groups you wish to delete and then clicking on the delete icon in the last row of the table.

Comments:

To prevent accidental disaster, deleting a group does not automatically delete all users in the group. In fact, deleting a group does not make any changes at all to user accounts within the group. Therefore, if you accidentally delete a group, you can add that group again. You would need to set up moderator editing privileges again if you did this.

Assigning moderator privileges (editing an existing group): To assign moderator editing privileges within an existing group, click the edit icon next to the group where you wish to do this. You can also assign editing privileges within more than one group at the same time by checking the boxes next to the groups to which you wish to assign moderator editing privileges, and then clicking on the edit icon in the last row of the table.

On the resulting screen, check the box or boxes next to the moderator or moderators to whom you're assigning editing privileges within this group. Then, click the "Save Settings" button to finalize your changes. Upon doing this, you'll be returned to the main list of groups, and a message at the top of the screen will indicate that your settings have been successfully saved.

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If you are assigning editing privileges to one particular moderator, it may be faster to use the Moderator Manager and click on the groups icon (in the "Grps" column). The Group Manager is quicker if you're assigning multiple moderators to have privileges within one group.

To add a group, click the "Add Group" tab. Supply a name for the group in the box, using between 1 and 15 alphanumeric characters. Note that a space is NOT an alphanumeric character. When you wrote that the name of the group, click the "Add this Group" button. You'll be returned to be "Add Group" screen and you'll see a status message at the top of the screen indicating that the group was successfully created. You'll receive an error message if you try to create a group that has the same name as an existing group.

Comments:

Previous versions of Discus and Discus Pro assigned editing privileges to topics based on groups. In that scheme, a topic would be owned by a group, and all moderators within that group would have editing privileges in the topic. The change has been made as of version 4.0 to assign editing privileges to moderators based on topics alone. This assignment is made using the Topic Manager. The DiscusWare developers believe that this method of assigning moderators will be more straightforward for most applications.