Community roles are special titles your organization can create to assign to your members. But they're more than just a title. You can use community roles to define specific access permissions like which communities a user can access, and what content they can view in those communities. In addition, Admins can customize the visual appearance of user profiles for each role.

Once created, roles are assigned at the Community Type level, giving Super Admins the flexibility to make specific roles available to specific communities, which in turn ensures each community's unique needs are met.

IMPORTANT: Currently, community roles only define a user's level of access to a community's Workspace. See Workspace Overview to learn more. In the future, their use may expand to other Higher Logic modules.

Notes

• Creating community roles in this way is primarily meant for clients who are not integrated with an AMS; integrated clients will generally want to manage their user roles in that system. However, AMS-managed roles are displayed on the Community Roles page, but only for referential purposes (their Legacy Keys are displayed but they can't be edited or deleted).
• Only Super Admins can create roles, but Community Admins can assign them to members of their community. 

To manage your community roles:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Community > Communities > Roles.

Create roles

1. Click the plus sign to the right of the page title.

2. Give your role an appropriate name.
3. Provide a description to inform other admins as to this role's purpose. This description displays on the Community Roles page.
4. Click Save.

Next Steps

After creating a new role, there are a few steps you must take before it can be assigned to a user. Learn about the entire process in the Assign Roles to Users section below.

Assign roles to users

Before a role can be assigned to users, you must complete a number of preliminary steps. Let's walk through the entire process:

NOTE: Multiple roles can be assigned to a user; if so, they'll receive the combined permissions afforded by each role.

Step 1 - Associate role at Community Type level

Once created, community roles are associated at the Community Type level, giving Super Admins the flexibility to make specific roles available to specific communities, which in turn ensures each community's unique needs are met.

To do so:

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Community > Communities > Types.

3. Click the Edit button associated to the Community Type for which you want to make the role available.

4. Scroll down to the Permissions area. Then, select the role from the Add Community Roles menu - check marks are displayed for each role available to the Community Type, and they're listed in the menu.

NOTE: If you're an integrated client, AMS-managed roles are not listed here; they're managed and assigned through your integration. However, you can still create separate, unique Higher Logic roles and assign those to your members. This is helpful in cases where you need a role that's not available in your AMS to fulfill a specific purpose.

5. Click Save at the bottom of the page. Your selected role(s) can now be assigned to members of the communities associated to this Community Type.

Step 2 - Assign role from community

Because roles are a community-based permission, they're assigned at the community level.

1. Navigate to the desired community.
2. Click Settings, followed by Members.

3. To assign a role to a member, click their Edit Roles button on the right.

NOTE: You can also assign roles to multiple users at once by checking the boxes to their left and then selecting Edit Roles from the bulk actions menu above.

4. In the pop-up, each available role is listed, along with a few other settings:

1. Assign the desired role(s) by toggling it to ON.
2. If needed, you can also limit how long a member has a role by setting an end date. This is helpful if, for example, you're giving a member a role for a specific task, like reviewing a number of documents in the community's Workspace, but you only want to give them this level of access for a limited time.
3. If this user is part of the community's leadership, you can toggle the Include in community leadership option to YES to give them a community leadership banner on the community's list of members (this widget is generally displayed on the community's Home page). See image below for an example.
4. If the user has multiple roles, you can select which one to highlight in the community's list of members (see image below for an example).

5. Click Save to assign the role(s) and any other settings you've applied.

Step 3 - Define role permissions

Only after a role has been assigned to at least one community member can its permissions be defined in the Admin interface.

NOTE: After assigning a role to a user, it will take a period of time for it to sync to Workspace.

1. In the Admin Toolbar, click Admin.

2. Navigate to Workspace > Group Roles.

3. Click the role's associated modify link on the right.

NOTE: As mentioned above, a newly assigned role must sync to Workspace before appearing on this page; if you don't see your role, you'll have to wait for the sync to complete.

4. On the resulting page, you can define the following role permissions:

5. Click Update at the bottom of the page to save the role's permissions.

Manage roles

Select a role in the list to access the following options:

• Click Edit to change its name and description.
• Select Delete, followed by Delete in the confirmation pop-up, to permanently remove the role.