Introduction

Generally, all forums are open for all registered users to participate. That means that any user can see the topics on any forum and comment or vote.

However, a forum owner could want to restrict the participation to a closed group or make the forum entirely private. All that cases are covered with DemocracyOS permission model. So, in DemocracyOS

• a forum can be open for all, where everyone can comment and vote;
• a forum can be restricted, where everyone can see the topics but some people can comment and vote;
• a forum can be secret, where nobody can see the topics or vote unless they are authorized by the owner or an admin.

We distinguish five roles on a forum:

• The Owner is unique, and cannot be changed. It’s free to change everything regarding this forum.
• Administrators can give permissions to other users, edit forum settings, and manage the content (create and edit topics, etc).
• Collaborators can add, edit and delete topics on this forum.
• Authors can add topics but can’t publish them, can only edit own not published topics.
• Participants can comment and vote this forum if it’s Restricted or Private.
• Moderator can delete comments if allowed through config.

This article is intended to provide you, as a developer, guidelines to understand and extend the permissions approach.

The model

This permission model is represented in the forum model, since we are only applying restrictions at a forum level. You’ll find the following files next to the forum directory (lib/models/forum/):

• index.js: Both forum and permissions schemas, and its own specifics methods.
• privileges.js: Privileges are the calculated actions users can make, based on a User permissions and the forum’s visibility.
• roles.js: List of roles allowed for forum permissions on each User.
• visibilities.js: List of allowed values for visibility key on forums.

Middlewares

Some API operations are permission-aware, so when a user tries to perform any of it, the privileges should be checked. It is done by using Express middlewares that are implemented in lib/middlewares/forum-middlewares/index.js.