Robust gatekeepers

Webcrossing has always been known for robust access controls. Out of the box, you can control who can view, who can post, who is moderated, and who is an administrator. Plus, all of this is conveniently under scripting control as well.

There are 5 levels of access:

• Host: hosts have administrator access to view everything, post anywhere exempt from the moderation controls, add anything, edit or delete anything belonging to anybody, move content around, change settings, and in general, play God. Or at least sub-God.
• Participant: these are your normal, run of the mill users who can post messages and read all the usual stuff.
• Moderated: these users can do everything a participant can, except his or her posts are run through the moderation machinery to check for objectionable words
• Read only: these people can read posts, but not post anything of their own.
• No access: these folks can't get into places where they are marked no access. In fact, we don't even show them the titles. None of that "Nyah, nyah, this looks like a cool title but you can't get there. Nyah Nyah." On the contrary, from their perspective, it simply doesn't exist.

Access is attached to a location (folder, discussion, etc.) in the forum hierarchy, and is inherited from parent levels unless another access list is set somewhere further down in the hierarchy.

You can give access to an individual user, or a designated group of users. This makes maintaining lists of, say, class members, much simpler. You can give different access to registered users vs. guest users. For example, you might let registered users post messages, but not guests.

So, some real-world examples.

• You could have an "Announcements" discussion where everyone was read-only, and administrators posted notices.
• You could have a panel discussion area where a panel of invited experts would be set as participants to discuss an issue while everyone else was read-only.
• You can set troublemakers to read-only or no access.
• You could create a user group consisting of your under-13 users and set them to moderated, so that their posts could be checked for revealing personal information.
• You could create a special private discussion for each member of a class, so they could ask the instructor private questions. Everyone else would be sets to no access.
• You could set all guest users to moderated (to check for spam posts) while letting your registered users post without moderation.
• With scripting, you could create a special portal or landing page for users, and give them host access within their own space.

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. Webcrossing access controls are robust, flexible, and work out of the box without any scripting intervention.