Forum Users 

Personas

Subject to specific tasks and permissions, the following personas might be involved in forum activities:

Persona	Description
Administrator	Administrators manage the forums, their structure, and their content. The administrative roles can be assigned globally (for the entire forums application) or for a particular category or forum.
Moderator	This administrative role pertains only to particular forums.
Participant	Participants are users who post messages to the threads – questions or subjects – that make up the forums. They are granted specific content permissions.

User Management

All portal users managed in the User Management Engine (UME) of the portal can access forums. Portal roles only control access to forum iViews. To allow portal users or groups to administrate forums or to participate by posting their own messages, you need to assign them forum-specific permissions.

Even if you delete a portal user, the forum messages posted by this user are retained. The system displays the user Guest as the author of such messages. 

We recommend that you draw up a legally-binding agreement with forum participants confirming that you can retain their messages.

Changes to UME User Data

For technical reasons, changes to user and group data carried out in the UME might become visible in the forums application with a certain delay. This delay might cause inconsistencies.

If required, you can configure the forums application to receive automatic real-time notifications on changes to UME user and group data.

More information: Enabling Notification of UME Changes for the Forums Application

Default Groups

The following default groups are delivered with the standard configuration of forums:

●      Registered Users

All users with a valid user account in the UME; corresponds to the UME group Authenticated Users.

●      Anyone

Both users with a valid UME account and users using an anonymous UME account such as Guest; corresponds to the UME group Everybody.

All new categories and forums are created with a default set of permissions assigned to the default groups. For example, anyone can read threads and messages while all registered users can create threads and messages.

We recommend that you revoke any permissions assigned to the default groups Registered Users and Anyone and assign permissions to UME users and groups only.