Managing Membership

A user can be assigned different roles in a community. The two primary roles are OWNER and MEMBER. A user in MEMBER role has all the regular member privileges. If it is assigned the OWNER role too, it will assume additional privileges to manage the community. The privileges and the content presented to the user are controlled by the merge of the corresponding display profiles for each of the role assigned to a user. System administrator must be careful when designing the display profiles templates for each community role. Please see the community template chapter for more details.

A non-member user implicitly assumes the VISITOR role and as a result, the visitor.xml is always merged when a non-member user visits a particular community page. A user is referred as a non-member when it either has no explicit role or has transient roles like BANNED, INVITED, PENDING and REJECTED.

Restricted Membership Workflow

In order for a user to join a community which is either private or has a restricted membership, a membership request should be made by the interested user. The owner of the community then either approves or denies the request. When approved, the user immediately becomes a member of the community. On the other hand, a denied user receives notice of rejection when the user logs into the portal and upon acknowledging the rejection, the user returns to the visitor status. A denied user can then submit request again at a later time. Owners can ban certain users if the owner does not even want the users to submit a request for membership.

VISITOR	--request membership-->	PENDING/VISITOR-->	approved-->	MEMBER
VISITOR	--request membership-->	PENDING/VISITOR-->	denied
																							|
																	-->REJECTED/VISITOR	--acknowledges-->	VISITOR

Inviting Users

As an owner of a community, one can send invitation to users to join the community. An invited user can see the invitation when the user logs into portal. The user then has an option to either accept or decline the invitation.

VISITOR-->		invited-->	INVITED/VISITOR-->	accepts-->	MEMBER
VISITOR-->		invited-->	INVITED/VISITOR-->	declines-->	VISITOR

When the system is set up properly, an invitation message is sent to the invited users through email. In order to receive an invitation through email, the user must have email address properly configured in their portal.

Banning Users

Banning is a process by which the owner can prohibit certain users from accessing the community. Both members and non-members, as well as owners, can be banned from the community and in the case of a restricted membership community, a banned user cannot even submit a request to join the community.

A banned user can be unbanned by the owner and the user's prior privileges are reinstated. If the user was a member before getting banned, the user becomes a member after getting unbanned. Likewise, when an owner gets banned from a community and is then unbanned, the owner becomes the owner of the community again.

MEMBER-->				banned-->	BANNED/VISITOR-->		unbanned-->	MEMBER
OWNER/MEMBER-->		banned-->	BANNED/VISITOR-->		unbanned-->	OWNER/MEMBER