Community Roles and Permissions

Roles help you organize your community and give members special abilities in the community. Community owners can create additional roles with custom names and permissions, such as a “Moderator” or an “Admin” role.

Understanding the base membership role

Every community automatically includes a base membership role. This is the starting point for everyone who joins the community.

• Every member is assigned this role by default.
• This role cannot be deleted.
• Community owners can edit its permissions to decide what every member can do by default.

How to assign roles to members

A community member always has the base membership role and can also have one or more additional roles. Their abilities combine the permissions from all of their roles.

To assign or remove a role:

1. Go to Communities and select your community.
2. Select the three dots menu (...), then select Configure Community.
3. Select Members in the sidebar.
4. Find the member and use the role controls next to their name to add or remove roles.

You must be the community owner or have the correct permission to manage member roles. You can only assign roles below your highest role if you are not the community owner.

Creating, updating, and deleting roles

Community owners and members with manage roles permissions can create new roles for free.

To create a role:

1. Go to Communities and select your community.
2. Select the three dots menu (...), then select Configure Community.
3. Select Roles in the sidebar.
4. Select Create role.
   • Choose a unique role name for your new role.
   • You can also decide whether a role is created as public or private. Public roles can be shown on a community page and in experiences. Private roles are typically only shown on community management pages.

This will create a new role with the default permissions. To edit these permissions and see what each one does, see the following Editing a Role and Its Permissions section.

To update a role:

1. Select an existing role in the list.
   • Go to the Permissions tab to set the permissions you want users in that role to have.
   • Go to the Members tab to add or remove users from the role, and see who is in this role.
   • Go to the Settings tab to update the name, color, and visibility of the role.
2. Drag roles in the sidebar to reorder them.

Roles are listed in order of authority. A role higher in the list has more authority than a role below it. Move a role in the list to change its position. For certain permissions, you are not permitted to take action against a member whose highest role is equal to or higher than your own.

To delete a role:

1. Select an existing role in the list.
2. Go to the Settings tab of the role.
3. Select Delete role.

Deleting a role removes it from members who have it, but does not remove those members from the community. The base membership role cannot be deleted.

Understanding role permissions

Community owners can edit roles and their permissions from within the Roles tab of the Configure Community page. If a member has multiple roles, they have the combined permissions of all of their roles.

When editing a role, you can toggle the following permissions: