Admin
Admin users are the superusers in the system, they can:
- Impersonate non admins
- Change site settings
- Create groups
- Amend site customizations
- Perform all the actions moderators can perform
- Read any personal message
- Create, delete and modify categories
- Ignore category permissions to view private categories
Storage: The boolean field admin in the users table flags any admin accounts.
Developer
Special account used to install Discourse
- View rack-mini-profiler showing timings on the page
- Impersonate any account including admins
- Automatically becomes admin and has all admin rights
Storage: controlled via the developer_emails global setting or the developers table, in Docker install use the env var DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS to specify an email list of users who are developers.
Moderator
Power user capable of moderating the site:
- Gets shield icon next to name on posts
- Can perform all actions Staff can perform
Storage: the boolean field moderator in the users table
Staff
A user that is either an admin a moderator or both.
- Immune to rate limits
- Can process flags and posts held in the moderation queue
- Can delete topics and posts, split topics, merge topics, hide topics and so on.
- Can view user info(Excluding emails for moderators)
- Can suspend, silence, anonymize and delete users
- Can adjust a user’s trust level
Storage: computed from the admin and moderator columns on the users table
Trust level 0 - 4
See: What do user trust levels do?
Storage: the numeric field trust_level in the users table
New user
Special restricted account for first day of usage or new accounts. new_users have special rate limits defined in site settings
- Trust Level 1 account created in the last 24 hours, or Trust Level 0
- Non staff account
Limits:
- Can only create a topic once every 2 minutes (rate_limit_new_user_create_topic)
- Can only create a post once every 30 seconds (rate_limit_new_user_create_post)
Storage: computed from created_at, moderator, admin, and trust_level columns on the users table
First day user
Special additional restrictions that apply to an account created in the last 24 hours
- Account created in the last 24 hours
- Non staff account
- Not TL2 or above
Limits:
- May only create 10 replies (max_replies_in_first_day)
- May only create 3 topics (max_topics_in_first_day)
Storage: computed from created_at, moderator, admin, and trust_level columns on the users table
Silenced
Either manually by staff or when an account is flagged by spam system as a problem account, all posting is disabled.
- Account may not reply to any topic
- Account may not create any topics
- Account may not create PMs, but can reply to PMs
- Account may not create flags
- Account still can like and bookmark
- Account can still change user prefs and about me (TBD if this is a good idea)
- Mailing list mode stops working
Storage: silenced boolean column in the users table
Active
Account has a verified email and is therefore active in Discourse instance
- Account may login to Discourse, inactive accounts may not login
- Inactive accounts can only verify their email (and other routes as necessary to complete registration).
Storage: active boolean column in the users table
Approved
If the site setting must_approve_users is enabled a user must be approved prior to being allowed to log in.
Storage: approved boolean column in the users table
Suspended
Account suspended from Discourse instance
- A note is displayed on user page denoting suspension reason
- Login is not allowed
- Account can only be mentioned by staff
- No emails are sent to user for any notifications (digest, message and so on)
- As an exception any emails initiated by staff are still sent to user
Storage: suspended_till datetime column in users table
Staged
A special placeholder account which is created automatically by the system for email integration
- No email digests are ever sent
- Automatically watches all messages it participates in and receives notifications of replies
- May reply via email to notifications
- Username and Name are automatically picked
- Account may still register with the same email and “take over” the staged account.
- Forgot password will do nothing …when you attempt to send a password reset to a staged account
Storage: staged field in users table