All Saints Vernon

Administration Help

Groups and Members

This directory stores information about individuals and groups, and the relationships between them.

Individuals are related to groups through membership. An individual can be a member of any number of groups.

Groups relate to each other as subgroups of one another. Through subgroup relationships groups can be connected into "family trees" of any size or configuration. The only restriction on subgroup family trees is that these relationships may not be circular: i.e., a group can't be "its own grandpa".

Individuals are normally related to each other through membership in common groups. The only relationship between individuals other than through group membership is the relationship of sponsorship. A sponsor is the administrator who first entered a person's name and information into the database. Sponsors are allowed to edit or delete the personal information of those whom they sponsored, even if they cease to be an administrator.

Positions

A group may have any number of named positions, sorted hierarchically on the page according to the values you assign. Group members who have an official position will always be displayed before those without any official position.

Note that the hierarchy values assigned to positions are also used on individual member pages to sort their group memberships.

Forums

A group may have any number of forums attached to it. If a group has exactly one forum people can click directly to the forum from the group information page.

Forums are general-purpose message boards. They can be used for group discussions, guestbooks, news, or additional information storage for the group. In order for a group's forums to be useful you will need to set the forum permissions correctly - see the help under the Security page for details.

"Removing" vs. "Deleting"

When an individual or a subgroup is "removed" from a group the removed individual or subgroup is not deleted from the directory.

To permanently erase a group or individual from the directory, use the "delete" command on the editing page. Deleting a group will also delete all of the group's forums and associated messages. You may only delete a group if you have administration privileges for the group itself and all the groups of which it is a subgroup.

Deleting an individual will have the side-effect of removing their name from all messages they may have posted on directory forums (i.e. their messages will be displayed as having been posted by "guest"). If you want to preserve their forum history, do not delete the member's record: instead simply remove them from all group memberships and delete all personal information apart from their name.

Return to directory