Vanilla Forums Documentation User Management

Automatic Role Assignment

To streamline the process of assigning Roles to your users, Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) provides two automated methods of doing so:

Via the Automatic Role Assignment feature
Via email domain

In this article, you'll learn how to do both.

📝 NOTE: To learn more about Roles, and their associated permissions, check out this article.

Automatic Role Assignment

This method allows you to decide which of your Roles should be automatically assigned to Vanilla's four broad categories of users:

Members - users who have completed their account registration
Unconfirmed - users who have not yet confirmed their email addresses
Applicants - users whose membership request is pending approval
Guests - users who have not logged in

This enables you to control which set of permissions these user types should have.

Steps

1. Access the Dashboard.

2. Navigate to Settings > Membership > Roles and Permissions.

3. Edit (or create) the Role you’d like to automatically assign to users.

4. Enable the Automatic Role Assignment toggle.

5. Click the Automatically assign this role to dropdown and select the desired option:

Members to automatically assign this Role to all users who complete their registration
Unconfirmed to automatically assign this Role to all users who have not yet confirmed their email addresses
Applicants to automatically assign this role all users whose membership request is pending approval
Guests to automatically assign this Role to users who have not logged in

6. At the bottom of the page, click Save to apply your changes.

Assign Roles via email domain

Do you need to automatically assign a special set of permissions to all users belonging to a specific email domain? If so, let's walk through how to add new users to specific Roles based on their email domain (in addition to the default Member Role).

Considerations

For this method to work, your Vanilla community must be configured to require users to confirm their email addresses to register (to enable this feature, navigate to Dashboard > Settings > Membership > Registration).
Users must confirm their email addresses to be placed in the selected Role(s). Those who do not will remain in the default Unconfirmed Role.
Roles are not immediately auto-assigned to all users of a domain.
- The Role is assigned to any matching users when they register OR the next time they log in.
- For example, if the Admin Role is auto-assigned to higherlogic.com users, then the next time these users log in they will be auto-assigned this Role (as long as their email is confirmed).
- If emails are not confirmed, the Role is not assigned.

Steps

1. Access the Dashboard.

2. Navigate to Settings > Membership > Roles and Permissions.

3. Edit (or create) the Role you’d like to silo all users from a particular domain into.

4. Enable the Automatic Role Assignment toggle to display the Domains option.

5. In the Domains field, enter the appropriate domain name(s). Adding multiple domains is done via space separation, not line separation (e.g., higherlogic.com vanillaforums.com).

6. At the bottom of the page, click Save to apply your changes.

Any users belonging to the domain(s) listed here will automatically be assigned this Role upon joining the community, in addition to the default Member Role.

✔️ TIP: You can edit (or create) multiple Roles and list these same domains to have multiple Roles assigned to these users.