This page describes how rights and permissions work for the MyConversations plugin installed on this forum.

MyConversations supports conversations and conversation groups.

• A conversation consists in one or more forum members (conversation "participants") and their associated rights, and one or more messages. Conversation messages are much like posts in (public) forum threads, and conversations are displayed similarly to the way (public) forum threads are displayed. The main difference is that only the conversation's participants can view the conversation and its messages.
• A conversation group consists in one or more forum members (group "participants") and their associated rights, plus a set of conversations belonging to the group. A conversation can belong to at most one group, but needn't belong to any group at all (in which case it is "ungrouped"). All group participants can view all conversations - and the messages within them - belonging to the group.

As indicated above, conversation and group participants have the right - whilst they remain participants - to view the messages in the (group's) conversation(s). This right can only be taken away from them by removing them from the conversation/group. But who can remove participants from a conversation/group, and what are the other rights that are "associated" with conversation/group participants?

There are five primary rights associated with participants, whether in a conversation or a group:

• Add: The right to add new participants to the conversation or to the group (or to its group conversations).
• Remove: The right to remove participants from the conversation or from the group (or from its group conversations).
• Rename: The right to change the conversation's subject or to rename the group.
• Create: The right to create messages (post replies) in the conversation or to create conversations in the group.
• Assign: The right to grant or revoke any of these rights to or from any existing participant in the conversation or the group (and its group conversations) with the exception noted below.

Here are some of the details and caveats of the permission system beyond that listing:

• In a group, the group owner (the participant who created the group) has all of these five rights immutably and irrevocably.
• In an ungrouped conversation, the conversation owner (the participant who created the conversation) has all of these five rights immutably and irrevocably.
• In a group conversation, the effective owner (possessor of all rights immutably and irrevocably) is the group owner. The conversation owner has no special rights, unless s/he is also the group owner.
• Unless overridden, in a group conversation, a participant in the group inherits their rights in the group conversation from their rights in the group. In this inheritance scenario, if the participant's rights in the group are changed, then his/her rights in the conversation change correspondingly.
• Any participant in the group conversation with the assign right can, though, override those inherited rights for that conversation participant (again, with the exception noted below). Once a group conversation participant's rights have been overridden in a group conversation, changes to that participant's group rights will no longer be reflected in the participant's conversation rights (even if the participant's group conversation rights are changed back again to reflect their corresponding group rights). A current limitation of the plugin is that there is no indication in the user interface as to whether or not this is the case (i.e., whether or not the inheritance is still operative).
• Only the effective owner of a conversation/group can revoke the assign right from another participant. A participant with the assign right can only grant that right to another participant; unless the participant with the assign right is also the effective conversation/group owner, s/he cannot revoke that right from another participant, even when s/he granted it to that other participant in the first place (this is the exception referred to twice above).
• Any group conversation participant with the effective add right in that group conversation can add non-group participants to the group conversation.
• Any group conversation participant with the effective remove right in that group conversation can remove non-group participants from the group conversation.
• A group participant cannot be removed directly from a group conversation.
• Removing a group participant from the group will also remove him/her from any group conversations in which his/her rights have not been overridden. S/he will, as this implies, remain a participant in those group conversations in which his/her rights have been overridden unless/until removed from it by a participant in it with the effective remove right.
• A group owner cannot be removed from the group, and a conversation owner cannot be removed from the conversation.
• Otherwise, a participant in either a group or a conversation always effectively has the remove right with respect to him/herself. That is to say that s/he can always remove him/herself from the group or conversation regardless of what his/her listed rights are. Consistent with the above rule: a group owner cannot remove him/herself from the group, and a conversation owner cannot remove him/herself from the conversation.
• Both conversations and groups have default rights. The default rights are those granted automatically to added participants when the adding participant does not have the assign right. (They are also the rights with which an added participant is initialised in the user interface for subsequent editing by those participants with the assign right who are adding a new participant).
• Only the effective owner in a conversation or group can change the default rights for that conversation or group.
• As for the rights of group conversation participants, the default rights for a group conversation are inherited from the group unless overridden (though they can be overridden only, as implied immediately above, by the group owner). As for group conversation participant rights, if the group conversation's default rights have not been overridden, then they will change correspondingly when (if) the group's default rights are changed, and, as for group participant rights, they will no longer change correspondingly when (if) they have been overridden (even if they are changed back again to reflect their corresponding group default rights). And, again, a current limitation of the plugin is that there is no indication in the user interface as to whether or not this is the case (i.e., whether or not the inheritance is still operative).
• An existing ungrouped conversation can be added to a group, but only by the conversation's owner and only if s/he has both the assign and create rights in that group.
• A group conversation's group cannot be changed.

This concludes the explanation of MyConversations' rights and permissions system. I hope that it is useful to you.