Members, roles and invites
Three roles, and the difference between them is worth knowing before you send an invitation — the role is set when the link is made, not when it is used.
#The three roles
- Member
- Reads the site’s content, including everything on a private site that non-members cannot reach at all. Cannot create, edit or publish anything under the site’s name. This is the role for a class of students, or a readership.
- Contributor
- Everything a member can do, plus creating, editing and publishing the site’s content — including seeing its unpublished drafts, which members cannot. This is the role for the people writing the material.
- Admin
- Everything a contributor can do, plus the admin area: the site’s settings, branding, membership and invites, and deleting or transferring content out of the site.
The line that matters most is between Member and Contributor, because it is the line between reading the site and writing it. If in doubt, invite someone as a Member — the role can be changed afterwards from the Members tab, and the smaller mistake is easier to correct.
#Invite links
The Invites tab of the admin area creates links. Anyone signed in to Internote who opens an active link joins the site with the role that link carries.
Each link is created with three controls:
- A role — Member, Contributor or Admin — fixed when the link is made.
- An expiry: 7 days, 30 days, or never. An invitation to one cohort should not still work a year later, so a dated one is usually the right answer.
- An optional cap on how many times it can be used, for handing a link to a known number of people.
Each row shows how many times a link has been used against its cap, when it was created, and when it expires. Any link can be revoked, which stops it working immediately.
#Adding and removing people
The Members tab holds the full list. From it you can change someone’s role, remove them, or add a new person directly by email without going through a link.
Removing someone is not permanent in the sense they can rejoin at will — a removed person cannot use invite links for that site again, and has to be added back directly by an admin.
#Where this lives
The admin area is reachable from the Sites tab of your Preferences, and covers more than membership — Running a site takes the other three tabs.